The Guilty (6 page)

That's the tale I told Jorge. Two days later, he called to tell me we had a “raw story.” It was no good for a movie, but it was good enough to impress a producer.

My brother trusted in my knowledge of illegal crossings, and in the correspondence writing course I'd taken before becoming a trucker, when I still dreamed of being a war correspondent because it meant getting far away.

For six weeks, we sat across from each other, sweating. From his end of the table, Jorge would shout, “Producers are assholes, directors are assholes, actors are assholes!” We were writing for a commando of assholes. That was our advantage: without their knowledge, we would maneuver them into transmitting an uncomfortable truth. Jorge called it “Chaplin's whistle.” In one movie, Chaplin swallows a whistle that keeps making noise inside his stomach. That's what our screenplay would be like, the whistle the assholes would swallow. There would be no way to stop it sounding off inside them.

But as if every word needed the ñ that was stuck on my keyboard, I couldn't make sense of the story. Then Jorge spoke as our father had at the table. We needed to
feel guilty. We were too indifferent. We had to fuck ourselves over to deserve the story.

We went to a dogfight and bet the two thousand dollar advance. We picked a dog with an X-shaped scar on its back. It looked blind in one eye. Later we found out that rage made it wink one eye shut. We won six thousand dollars. Luck was on our side; terrible news for a screenwriter, according to Jorge.

I don't know if he took some kind of drug or pill, but I'm sure he didn't sleep. He settled back in a rocking chair on the porch, gazing at the desert acacias and the abandoned chicken coops, the shears open across his chest. The next day, while I was stirring my instant coffee, he shouted at me with crazed eyes, “No guilt, no story!” The problem,
my
problem, was that I was already guilty. Jorge never asked me what I had been doing on that dirt road in a Spirit that didn't belong to me, and I had no desire to tell him.

When my brother had abandoned Lucía, she left with the first customer to come by the gas station. She went from one spot on the border to another, from a Jeff to a Bill to a Kevin, until there was someone called Gamaliel who seemed stable enough. He was married to another woman, but still willing to provide for Lucía. He wasn't a migrant but a “new gringo,” a son of hippies who looked for baby names in the migrants' Bibles. Lucía filled me in on the details. She'd call from time to time and make sure she had my contact information, as if I were something she hoped she'd never need to make use of. A bit of insurance in the middle of nowhere.

One afternoon she called to ask me for a “big, huge favor.” She needed to send a package, and I knew the roads well. Curiously, she sent me somewhere I had never been, close to Various Ranches. After that, she always used me to deliver her smaller packages. She told me they were medicine that didn't require a prescription here and was worth a lot on the other side, but she smiled in a strange way when she said it, as if “medicine” was code for money or drugs. I never opened a single envelope. That was my loyalty to Lucía. My loyalty to Jorge was not thinking too much about the breasts under her shirt, the thin, ringless hands, the eyes aching for relief.

When we'd decided to sell the farm, all six brothers got together for the first time in a long while. We fought over prices and practical details. That's when Jorge kicked the fan. He cursed us between phrases pulled from the Bible, raving about wolves and lambs, the table with a place always set for the enemy. Then he turned on the fan and heard the sound of the baby rattle. He smiled, like it was funny. This brother who'd helped me pull off my pants to feel the delicious cold of the river after a lashing now imagined himself a filmmaker esteemed enough to kick fans. I hated him like never before.

The next time Lucía called me for a delivery, I didn't leave her house till the following day. I told her my car had broken down. She loaned me the Spirit that Gamaliel had given her. I wanted to keep touching something of Lucía's, even if the car came from another man. I thought about that on the road. It made me want to leave my
own mark on the Spirit. That's why I stopped to buy watermelons.

I never saw Lucía again. I returned the car when she wasn't home and I tossed the keys in the mailbox. There was an acrid taste in my mouth; I felt like breaking something. That night, I called Jorge. I told him about the zombies and the watermelons.

After six weeks, blue circles ringed my brother's eyes. He cut the dollars won at the dogfight into little squares, but that didn't bring us creative guilt either. I don't know if his concept of punishment came from life on the farm with our fanatical father, or if the drugs on the coast of Oaxaca had expanded Jorge's mind into a field for reaping regrets.

“Rob a bank,” I told him.

“Crime doesn't count. We need guilt that can be overcome.”

I was about to tell him I had slept with Lucía, but the chicken shears were too close.

Hours later, Jorge was smoking a twisted cigarette. It smelled like marijuana, but not enough to counter the stench of fowl. He looked at the saltpeter stain where the picture of the Virgin had been. Then he told me he was still in contact with Lucía. She had a modest business. Contraband medicine. He asked me if I had something to tell him. For the first time, I began to think the screenplay was a set-up to make me confess. Without a word, I went out to the porch and looked at the Windstar. Was it possible that the “producer” was Gamaliel, that the money and the minivan came from him? Was Jorge his messenger? Was my brother harboring someone
else's jealousy? Could he have degraded himself with such precision?

I went back to my chair and wrote the whole night without stopping. I exaggerated my erotic encounters with Lucía. In this indirect confession, shamelessness could cover me. My character took on the defects of a perfect son of a bitch. To Jorge, it would have been realistic for me to act like the weak man I really was, but he couldn't credit me with such magnificent villainy. The next day,
The Body Count
was ready. It had no ñ's, but it was ready.

“You can always count on an ex-alcoholic to satisfy a vice,” he told me. I didn't know if he was referring to his vice of turning guilt into film or satisfying the jealousy of others.

With the chicken shears, Jorge made some cuts to the screenplay. The most significant was my name. He made money with
The Body Count,
but it was a bland success. No one heard Chaplin's whistle.

As for me, something kept me in front of the typewriter, perhaps a line of my brother's from his last night on the farm:

“The scar is on the other ankle.”

I had slept with Lucía, but I didn't remember the site of her scar. Making things up was my refuge. Was that the vice Jorge had referred to? I would keep writing. That night, I limited myself to saying,

“I'm sorry, forgive me.”

I don't know if I cried. My face was wet with sweat, or tears I didn't feel. My eyes hurt. The night opened up before us, like when we were boys and we'd climb onto the roof to make wishes. A light streaked the sky.

“August 12th,”Jorge said.

We spent the rest of the night watching shooting stars, like bodies lost in the desert.

MAYAN DUSK

It was the iguana's fault. We stopped in the desert next to one of those men who spend their whole lives squatting, holding three iguanas by the tail. The man we called
El Tomate,
“the Tomato,” inspected the merchandise as if he knew something about green animals.

The peddler, with a face carved by sun and drought, told us that iguana blood restored sexual energy. He didn't tell us how to feed the animal because he thought we would eat it right away.

El Tomate works for a travel magazine. He lives in a ghastly building that looks out on the Viaduct. From there, he describes the beaches of Polynesia.

This time, as an exception, he really was visiting the places he would write about, Oaxaca and Yucatán. Four years earlier, we had made the trip in the opposite
direction, Yucatán-Oaxaca. Back then we were so inseparable that if people saw me without him, they would ask, “Where's El Tomate?”

We finished that last trip at the ruins of Monte Albán during a solar eclipse. The golden stones lost their glow and the valley was cast in a weak light that didn't belong to any time of day. The birds sang out in bewilderment and tourists took each other by the hand. I felt a strange urge to repent, and confessed to El Tomate that I had been the one who pushed him into the cenote at Chichén Itzá.

That had happened a few days earlier. After seeing the sacred water, my friend couldn't stop talking about human sacrifices. The Mayans, superstitious about small things, threw their midgets, their toys, their jewels, their favorite children, all into the sacred water. I walked up to a group of deaf-mute visitors. A woman was translating the guide's information into sign language: “He who drinks from the cenote will return to Chichén Itzá.” We were at the water's edge, and El Tomate was leaning over it. Something made me push him in. The rest of the trip was an ordeal because the water gave him salmonella. At Monte Albán, in the indeterminate light of the eclipse, I felt bad and asked for his forgiveness. He took this as an opportunity to ask me, “Do you really not remember that I got you into the Silvio Rodríguez concert?” At the beginning of our friendship, in the early seventies, El Tomate had been the sound tech for the Mexican folk group Aztlán. His moment of glory arrived with his involvement in a festival of New Cuban Trova. Honestly I didn't remember him getting me that ticket, but he told
me with a droll smile,“I remember.” His smile irritated me because it was the same one he had when confessing he'd slept with Sonia, the Chilean refugee I'd chased around without the slightest possibility of getting into her poncho.

That reconciliation at Monte Albán was enough for us to stop seeing each other. We had crossed an invisible line.

For two years after that, we barely spoke. I didn't even call him when I found the Aztlán LP he had loaned me thirty years before. Once in a while, at the barbershop or at the dentist's office, I would find a copy of the magazine where he wrote about islands he would never see.

El Tomate got back in touch when I won the Texcoco Floral Games with a poem that I thought was pre-Ra-phaelite, heavily influenced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The prize was awarded as part of the Pulque Festival. El Tomate called at seven in the morning on the day the winner was announced. “I want to
carve a carpel from the epos,”
he exclaimed joyfully. Which meant that he wanted to go with me to the award ceremony, possibly to call in the favor of having gotten me into the questionable Silvio Rodríguez concert. I didn't respond. What he said next offended me. “López Velarde. Didn't you recognize the quote, poet?”

I said I would call him to set things up, but I never did. I imagined him in Texcoco too perfectly: gray hairs visible on the underside of his mustache, drinking a sour-smelling pulque, and declaring that my poems were terrible.

His most recent call involved the Chevy. I had filled out a form at a Superama grocery store and won a car. I was in the paper, an expression of primitive happiness on my face as I accepted a set of keys that seemed to have been fashioned for the occasion (the keychain gave off a luxurious sparkle). El Tomate asked me to take him from Oaxaca to Yucatán. He had to write an article. He was sick of imagining life in five star hotels and writing about dishes he would never taste. He wanted to plunge into reality. “Like before,” he added, inventing for us some shared past as anthropologists or war correspondents.

Then he said, “Karla will come with us.” I asked him who she was and he became evasive. I was still recovering from the photo of me holding the car keys appearing in the paper and suddenly wanted to do things that might annoy me. Also, something had happened that I needed to get away from. A lot of time has passed but I still can't talk about it without getting embarrassed. I'd slept with Gloria López, who was married, and there had been an accident unlike anything either of us had ever experienced before. An improbable occurrence, like some spontaneous combustion that burns a body or a film negative to ashes. My condom disappeared inside her vagina. “An abduction,” she said, more intrigued than worried. Gloria believes in extraterrestrials. She was reasonably interested in me for the occasional roll in the hay, but she was enormously interested in a contact of the “third kind,” for which I had been a mere intermediary.

How can indestructible rubber just disappear? She was sure that it had something to do with aliens. Could she get pregnant, or would the condom be encapsulated?
That verb reminded me of her favorite movie,
Fantastic Voyage,
with Raquel Welch. Gloria was too young to have seen it when it first came out. An ex-boyfriend who dedicated himself to pirating videos had awakened her to a fantasy which seemed to have been created just for her. A ship's crew is reduced to microscopic size and injected into a body to perform a complex medical operation. The body as a variant of the cosmos could only excite someone who lived to be abducted and pulled into other dimensions. “What would the internauts feel like inside of you?” Gloria asked with the seriousness of someone who considers such a thing to be possible. “Is there anything kinkier than having internauts in your veins ?” The movie's producers were thinking the same thing when they chose Rachel Welch and dressed her in an extremely tight white suit. The sexual nonsense of a tiny turgid body advancing through your blood seduced Gloria, who now felt crewed by the condom that had ended up inside her. It didn't help to recall that the original seamen exited the body through a tear duct, a metaphor announcing that all adventures of intravenous seduction end in tears. On top of all this was the possibility that Gloria's husband would find this improbable intruder by
the way of all flesh
(Alluding to Samuel Butler doesn't diminish the grotesqueness of the topic, I know, but at least it's too highbrow for El Tomate's taste).