The Guilty Read online

  “Yes,” I answered, to hurry along the dialogue.

  “Remember what happens to the blonde’s mannequin: it gets burned to a crisp. Then the leading lady gets burned to a crisp. Blondes who don’t talk end up in flames, sweetheart.”

  I wanted to make my exit, but Palencia stopped me:

  “Don’t get lost, now.” He touched my cheek with homicidal affection.

  I went back to my building. Cristi was standing at the door.

  “Sorry for dropping by unannounced. I was dying to see you.” Her eyes sparkled more than usual; she ran her hand through her hair nervously. “I’m not always like this, really.”

  We went up to my apartment. The first thing she did was look at my computer, recently cleared of its Post-it leaf litter.

  “I love the idea you start the script with: the computer covered in Post-its, like a modern-day Xipe Totec. You can feel the desperation of the screenwriter and the contemporary manifestation of syncretism. But I’m not here to get pedantic.” She took my hand.

  Gonzalo Erdiozábal had made me the protagonist of his script. His abusive imagination never ceased to amaze me, but I couldn’t go on thinking. Cristi’s lips were grazing mine.

  9. Barbie

  The classy thing would have been to forget my 200 pesos’ worth of cocaine, but I went back to the Oxxo prepared to go through every single can of acid-reflux formula. Not a single one was left.

  “The pollution gives babies reflux,” the cashier told me. “We never have enough cans.”

  Gonzalo was just as impossible to find as my cocaine. I left him multiple messages. In return, he recorded a terse message on my answering machine: “I’ve been running around like crazy. I’m going to Chiapas with some Swedish Human Rights guys. Good luck with the script.”

  At that point, we hadn’t heard anything about Keiko, either. Had he reached the open sea yet? I made the mistake of going back to Adventure Kingdom with Tania. A listless dolphin was swimming circles in the tank.

  Now I was worried about Katzenberg and afraid that Palencia would return to make me the fall guy for a crime I knew nothing about. But what I was most distressed about, I admit, was not knowing what “I” had written. Cristi loved the personality Gonzalo had captured in the script.

  I knew she had an exquisite mole halfway down her ribs, and a unique way of flicking her tongue in my ear, but I didn’t know how I had wooed her. Even though she insisted she’d been into me from the beginning, it was the script that really did it. Plus, the script let her feel like she’d had a hand in the way I’d opened up: she had suggested the topic. Her pride seemed well-deserved to me. I just needed to find out what her admiration was based on. She quoted phrases from the script with such frequency that when she said “God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” I thought it was something that “I” had written. She had to explain, with humiliating pedantry, that she was quoting John Lennon.

  Either Gonzalo’s text was very long, or my interior was very sparse. According to Cristi, it showed me in my entirety. She was especially amazed by my bravery in confessing my flaws and my emotional shortcomings. It was admirable that I’d been able to overcome them through Mexican syncretism: “I” represented the country with astonishing sincerity.

  Cristi was in love with the suffering, convincing character created by Gonzalo, the shadow of which I tried to imitate without a script to follow. Would it be going too far to ask Cristi for a copy?

  I began a vague program of personal reform. Spurred by the mysterious virtues Cristi attributed to me, I cut back on sordid mornings with bills up my nose. Life without coke isn’t easy, but little by little I was convincing myself to be a different man, complete with sudden tics and old-fashioned courtesy, to distinguish me from the absurd person I had been so far.

  The Katzenberg case was still open, and I had to go back to the Police Headquarters. My statements were counter-checked against the ones given by the other witnesses and the Oxxo cashier. A one-eyed agent took down everything we said. He wrote incredibly quickly, as if he had access to abilities beyond the grasp of people with two eyes.

  When compared, our statements—mangled, dubious, reticent—gave a violent sense of unreality, of almost purposeful contradictions. There were discrepancies in time and points of view. It didn’t do any good for me to say, “In this country, nobody knows anything.”

  They detained me longer than the others. After seven hours, one fact became clearer and clearer in my mind until it fit within the judicial range of “evidence:” when we left Los Alcatraces, I had used Katzenberg’s phone to tell Pancho we were on our way. Then I’d left it in the back seat of the car. I hadn’t given it back to him. That’s what the second kidnapper was looking for. They wanted Katzenberg with his phone.

  I was excited to find a missing piece amidst the chaos, but I didn’t tell the one-eyed agent. The phone was proof of my ties to cocaine trafficking.

  I was exhausted, but Officer Martín Palencia still wanted to talk to me. Natividad Carmona stood a few feet away, watching and eating a green Jell -O.

  “Take a look.” He showed me a Barbie doll. “This is one of the ones assembled in Tuxtepec, but they put Made in China on them. It was in Mr. Katzenberg’s room. Do you know why?

  “A gift for his daughter, I guess.”

  “Would you buy a Barbie in Mexico if you were a gringo? This is really getting to be like The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, oh, yes, it is.”

  Palencia came over to me:

  “Look, sweet thing. You can be a filmmaker without being a whore. I’m not at the point where I want you to suck my cock, but if you gave weird information to your gringo daddy, you’re gonna regret it. Bad girls get real fucked.” He opened the Barbie’s legs; his index finger looked like an enormous penis. “I don’t want to have to tear you in half, dolly girl.” It was clear he wasn’t talking to the Barbie.

  When they finally let me go, Carmona was chewing on an orange peel.

  10. Sharon

  Two days later a blonde entered the scene, though not the kind that Palencia was expecting. Sharon came to Mexico to look for her husband. She came in shorts, like she was visiting the palm-tree tropics. That outfit, and every other outfit of hers I saw, was quite unflattering on someone that overweight. On her feet, the reluctant Nikes didn’t seem sporty so much as orthopedic.

  I had a late breakfast with Sharon and left with a headache. She was annoyed that there were so many smoking tables, that the music was so loud, that televisions were omnipresent decorations. All of that annoys me too, but I don’t get hysterical about it. She was surprised that we Mexicans only know about yellow American cheese (apparently there’s also a white one, much healthier) and that I couldn’t tell her which of the three rolls they offered us had the most fiber. Her nutritional obsessions were pathological (considering how fat she was) and her cultural habits were put on no less severe a diet. To make conversation, I asked if her husband’s kidnapping was being reported on CNN.

  “Television is the same as a frontal lobotomy. I never watch it,” she responded.

  From the little she had seen of Mexico City, she was convinced we don’t respect the blind. I told her the best way to tolerate this city is to be blind, but she didn’t appreciate the joke.

  “I’m talking about the handicapped,” she said solemnly. “There are no ramps. Crossing a street is a savage act.”

  Even though she was right, it annoyed me that she’d make generalizations like that, having seen so few streets. I fell into a stony silence. She showed me the latest issue of Point Blank, with an article on Katzenberg: “Missing: Desaparecido.”

  I already disliked Sharon so much that I had no problem reading right in front of her. Between childhood photos and the testimonies of his friends, the journalist was evoked as a martyr to freedom of expression, meeting his end in a lawless wilderness. Mexico City provided a harrowing background for the article, a labyrinth ruled by petty tyrants and gods that should have
never crawled out of the earth.

  I was annoyed by the doctored beatification of the journalist, but I took his side when Sharon said,

  “Sammy’s no action hero. Do you know how many laxatives he takes a day?” She paused, and I was unsurprised when she added, “We were about to separate. I see a weird angle in all of this. Maybe he ran off with someone else, maybe he’s afraid to face my lawyers.”

  I didn’t have a very high opinion of Katzenberg, but his wife was arguing that he had kidnapped himself.

  Sharon looked over at the table next to us. Within minutes, she found ten things wrong with the way in which those parents were raising their child.

  I don’t know if Sharon was fortified by America’s Puritan traditions—pioneers who had defeated the fierce elements, undecorated churches where they sang hymns in pious simplicity, daily lives full of prayer. What I do know is she was convinced that horrible truth is more conclusive. She acted on the outskirts of emotional considerations, as if by separating feelings from acts, she was fulfilling an ethical end.

  Over dessert, which unfortunately did not include low-calorie cookies, she extrapolated her ethics. If she gave in to feeling, everything would be lost. She could only be guided by principles.

  She had sued Point Blank for publishing photos from the family album without permission. The photos had hurt her interests: once they got out, it would be more difficult to sell an exclusive for a miniseries about her husband’s tragedy.

  She had come from Los Angeles, where she had been talking with producers. I could be helpful. Obviously, nobody would accept a Mexican screenwriter. Would I be interested in a consulting position? Saying no had never been so sweet.

  “I’m Samuel’s friend,” I lied.

  11. La Bola is the World

  The nightmare of having to see Sharon was offset by Cristi’s unprecedented acts of love. She took Sharon to the Saturday Bazaar to buy traditional crafts, got her some drops that instantaneously disinfected salads, and gave her a list of 24-hour pharmacies.

  Plus, she was getting on great with Tania. She memorized the story about the carnivorous carrots so she could recite it for her during traffic jams.

  The most surprising thing was that Cristi’s abundant good vibes even made their way to Renata. They ran into each other one afternoon outside my apartment.

  “Your girlfriend’s so cute,” said my ex.

  For a moment, I thought that I too might be capable of “floating in the depths.”

  But one night, while I was drifting off watching the news, the phone rang.

  “I’m here.” Hearing that voice, trembling, subdued, barely audible, meant understanding, with hair-raising clarity, “I’m alive.”

  “Where is ‘here’?” I asked him.

  “In the Parque de la Bola.”

  I put on my shoes and crossed the street. Samuel Katzenberg stood next to the cement sphere. He looked thinner. Even in the darkness, his eyes reflected anguish. I hugged his checkered shirt. He wasn’t expecting that; he seemed startled. Then, as if he were only now learning how to do it, he put his arms around me. He wept, with a hollow moan. A man walking an Afghan crossed the street when he noticed us.

  Katzenberg smelled like rancid flesh. Between sobs, he told me they had let him go on the outskirts of town, near a cement factory. He’d flagged down a cab. He didn’t remember my address, but he did remember the absurd name of the traffic circle across the street.

  “Parque de la Bola,” he recited.

  He fell silent. Then he looked at the cement sphere, walked up to it, laid his stiffened hands on its surface, recognizing the weak contours of the continents.

  “La bola is the world,” he said intensely.

  We went up to my apartment. After he had showered, he told me that he’d been hooded and kept in a tiny closet. The only food they gave him was cereal. One time, they put hallucinogenic mushrooms in it. They took off his hood once a day so he could contemplate an altar covered in a strange combination of images: Catholic, pre-His-panic, postmodern. A Virgin of Guadalupe, an obsidian knife, dark sunglasses. In the afternoons, they played “The End” by the Doors, for hours and hours. Behind him, someone imitated the anguished, drugged-out voice of Jim Morrison. The torture had been terrible, but it had helped him understand the Mexican apocalypse.

  Katzenberg’s eyes darted from side to side, like he was looking for someone else in the room. I didn’t have to look. It was obvious who had kidnapped him.

  12. Friendly Fire

  “Miracle of miracles!” Gonzalo Erdiozábal answered the door in his slippers.

  I walked into his apartment without saying a word. It took some time before I could speak. Too many things were swirling around in my interior, that place I take such care to avoid when I write screenplays. When I finally started talking, I couldn’t convey the complexity of my emotions.

  Gonzalo sat on a sofa upholstered with mini carpets. The decor made manifest its owner’s textile hysteria. There were Huichol weavings in colors evoking the mental electricity of peyote, and Afghan rugs, and paintings by an ex-girlfriend who got her fifteen minutes of fame by threading horse hairs through amate paper.

  “Care for some tea?” offered Gonzalo.

  I didn’t give him the chance to play herbalist. I glanced at the poster of Morrison on the wall. The kidnapping had his patented design. How could he be so callous? He had made his victim kneel in front of a syncretic altar that might—and the idea terrified me—have appeared in “my” screenplay.

  With sincere and clumsy words, I talked about his taste for manipulation. We weren’t his friends. We were his pawns. We could go to jail because of him! The detectives had me under surveillance! If he didn’t give a damn about me, he could at least have thought of Tania. A bitter taste filled my mouth. I didn’t want to look at Gonzalo. I concentrated on the arabesques in the main rug.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, repeating the phrase that had, once again, proven him guilty. “I’m not asking you to understand. But every story has two sides. Let me tell mine.”

  I let him tell it, not because I wanted to but because my lips were trembling too much for me to refuse.

  He reminded me that on Samuel Katzenberg’s last visit, he had invented Mexican rituals at my behest. It was me who’d got him involved with the journalist. Martín Palencia had been right when he’d caressed the doll’s blonde hair: I had connected Katzenberg with his kidnapper, though I didn’t know it at the time. Why hadn’t I figured it out sooner? What kind of moron was I, next to Gonzalo?

  “I’m an actor,” he said in a calm voice. “I always have been, you know that. The thing is, theater got too small for me, so I started to look for other forums. You didn’t introduce me to Samuel so I’d tell him the truth, you introduced me so that I would simulate it.”

  Katzenberg had grown fond of Gonzalo, and told him when he was coming back to Mexico. He told Gonzalo before he told me. That’s why Gonzalo wasn’t surprised when I mentioned that the journalist was returning to the city. Was it wrong for Gonzalo to get back in touch with Katzenberg on his own? No, of course not. Samuel had been frank with him: his marriage was falling apart, and the pre-nup had a clause that freed him of all responsibility if he suffered a severe nervous breakdown. Plus, he needed to write a good story.

  “There was no anti-Semitic Irishman fucking his girlfriend and his wife. Samuel doesn’t have a girlfriend. Have you met Sharon? That proves the Irishman doesn’t exist. Sammy likes set-ups, too. He wanted to have you on his side. He thinks you’re sentimental. Do you know why he needed to write a good story? Because the fact checker screwed him over when he published the article on Frida Kahlo and the volcano. The fact checker found all kinds of exaggerations and lies, but he didn’t correct any of it. Two years later, there was a ‘fact audit.’ That sort of thing happens in the United States. They’re freaking truth-Puritans. A battalion of fact checkers went over the stories and Sammy got caught with his pants down. The principle source of
his garbage was you. You told him all kinds of bullshit to placate his need for exoticism. Samuel was wrong: his Deep Throat was delirious. Do you know why he went looking for you on his second visit? So he would know what not to write about. You’re the original faker. Accept it, jackass.”

  That’s what Katzenberg thought of me: my words represented the outer limits of credibility. That’s why he seemed so elusive and unsure at Los Alcatraces. He wasn’t distrusting the other tables, he was distrusting what was right in front of him.

  The kidnapping orchestrated by Gonzalo immersed Katzenberg in the reality he so yearned for. Katzenberg had lived it as something indisputably true: his days in captivity were devastatingly authentic.

  “In war, sometimes a commando will hit his own troops. They call it friendly fire, amigo. I don’t think Samuel suffered any more than he wanted to suffer. The divorce and the story were handed to him on a platter. Do you know who paid his ransom?” He took a theatrical pause. “His magazine.”

  “How much did they give you, you son of a bitch?”

  “Let me finish: do you know what Samuel uncovered?”

  I didn’t answer. My mouth was full of bitter spit.

  “Do you know about the Tuxtepec Barbies?” he asked me.

  I thought about the doll the detective had shown me, but I didn’t say anything. Gonzalo needed no response from me to keep talking:

  “Before he spoke to you, Samuel went to Tuxtepec. He discovered a factory full of Chinese workers. A Shanghai mafia was falsifying Mexican toys that were purportedly coming from Peking. We live in a world of ghosts: copies of copies, everything is pirated. Samuel’s next story is going to be called ‘Chinese Shadows.’”

  Gonzalo Erdiozábal poured himself a cup of tea.

  “You sure you don’t want any?”

  “Is it pirated tea?” I asked. “How much did you get out of them?”

  “What kind of insect do you think I am? I didn’t get anything. Those 75,000 dollars are for the poor children of Chiapas.”

  He showed me a receipt printed in a language I couldn’t read. Then he added,