The Guilty Page 11
“The Swedish government is going to supervise the deposits. We’re giving violence a run for its money, for a good cause.” He sipped his tea slowly, opening a parenthesis to add, “You confused poor Samuel with all that bullshit you told him last time. He almost lost his job. He didn’t know who to trust. If I hadn’t kidnapped him, the Chinese Mafia would have done him in.”
“You kidnapped him philanthropically?”
“Don’t oversimplify. In the end it was all for a good cause.”
I couldn’t take it any more:
“Do you think fucking Renata was a good cause?”
“What are you talking about?”
“About the hacienda, asshole. About the tennis court. About when you went with Renata to look for a ball and took forever to come back. I’m talking about the ball that I just found in the back seat of a Chevrolet, the Chevrolet where you fucked Renata. You’re an animal.”
Gonzalo was about to answer when his phone started ringing. The ring tone was Jimi Hendrix’s cover of the U.S. national anthem.
Bizarrely, Gonzalo said,
“It’s for you.” He handed me the phone.
It was Cristi. She had searched heaven, earth, and sea for me. She missed me unbearably. She missed the wrinkles around my eyes. Gunslinger wrinkles. That’s what she said. A gunslinger who kills everybody but is still the good guy of the movie.
Gonzalo Erdiozábal watched me from behind the cloud of steam that was rising from his tea.
When I hung up, he spoke in a weak voice.
“I made a mistake with Renata. It didn’t help anybody: not you, not her, not me. You two were falling apart. Admit it. I was the exit sign, nothing more. I apologized. Years ago. Do you want me to get down on my knees? I don’t mind. I’m sorry, güey. I fucked up with Renata, but not with Cristi.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“She adores you. I knew it from the day we ran into her on our way out of that awful play, The Lizards’ Corner. All she needed was a push. She had her doubts about you. Well, we all have our doubts about you, but at least that’s something, most people I have no doubt about. Most people are awful and that’s it.”
“Did you take her out to play tennis, too?”
“Don’t be banal. I wrote what I think of you, which apparently is marvelous. No? I did it in first person, as if it were you talking. I’m an actor; first person sounds very sincere in the voice of actors.”
I didn’t respond to that. It cost me a lot to say the words, but I couldn’t leave without asking:
“Do you have a copy of the script?”
“Of course, Maestro.”
Gonzalo seemed to have been waiting for me to ask. He handed me a spiral-bound folder.
“Do you like the cover? The texture is called ‘smoke.’ It’s black but you can see through it—like your mind. Read it so you can see how much I love you.”
Some remnant of dignity kept me from responding.
I left without the melodrama of slamming the door, but couldn’t resist the minor offense of leaving it open.
13. Dollars
Katzenberg went back to New York with his wife, but he got divorced a few weeks later, without any legal hiccups. Anyone who gets kidnapped in Mexico and is declared by the president to be “an American hero” is entitled to his pre-nup exception clause.
He called me from his new apartment, very grateful for what I had done for him.
“I misjudged you after my first trip. Gonzalo insisted that I contact you again. It really was worth it.”
His story about Chinese pirated goods was a success, soon surpassed by the chronicle of his kidnapping, which won the Meredith Non-Fiction Award.
With the same breathlessness as Katzenberg’s American readers, I read the script Gonzalo had forged for me with defiant precision. He had drawn a perfect pantomime of my manias, but he managed to make my limitations seem brilliant and interesting. His autobiography of me was a display of his actor’s skill at forgery, but also of the tolerance with which he had borne my flaws. He had a strange way of being a great friend, but he really was.
On account of my pride, it took me two months to tell him so.
I never said anything to Renata about her affair with Gonzalo. My only act of vengeance was to give her the tennis ball I found in the Chevrolet, though memory is a capricious universe. Indifferently, she took it and put it in a fruit basket, like just one more apple.
Cristi was getting along better and better with Tania, although she didn’t share our interest in Keiko, maybe because that had started before she came into our lives.
Only the news about the whale was sad: he didn’t know how to hunt, he hadn’t found a mate in the icy seas. He seemed to miss his aquarium in Mexico City. The only good thing—at least for us—was that he was going to star in the movie Free Willy.
“Why don’t you write the script?” Tania asked me, with that heartrending belief in me her mother had felt, years before.
Cristi was right, the time had come to forget the orca.
The final episode related to Samuel Katzenberg occurred one afternoon while I was contemplating the Parque de la Bola and the children skateboarding around the miniature world. The sky shone clean. Finally, the forest fires were over. A whisper sent me over to the door. Somebody had slipped an envelope underneath it.
I guessed what it was from its weight: not a letter, not a book. I opened the envelope carefully. Along with the dollars, there was a message from Samuel Katzenberg. “I’ll be coming to Mexico in the next few days, for another story. Is this good for an advance?”
Half an hour later, the phone rang. Katzenberg, for sure. The air filled with the tension of unanswered phone calls. But I didn’t pick up.
Copyright © Juan Villoro 2015
Translation Copyright © George Braziller 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including print, photocopy, recording, or any other information and retrieval system, without prior consent of the publisher. Requests for permission to reprint or make copies, and for any other information, should be addressed to the publisher:
George Braziller, Inc.
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New York, NY 10007
The Library of Congress has catalogued the printed edition as follows:
Villoro, Juan, 1956-
[Culpables. English]
The guilty: stories / by Juan Villoro; translated by Kimi Traube.—First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8076-0013-9
ISBN: 978-0-807-60014-6 (e-book)
I. Traube, Kimi, translator. II. Title.
PQ7298.32.I55C8513 2015
863’.64--dc23
2015004513
This publication was made possible with the encouragement of the Support Program for Translation (PROTRAD) under Mexican cultural institutions.
Esta publicación fue realizada con el estímulo del Programa de Apoyo a la Traducción (PROTRAD) dependiente de instituciones culturales mexicanas.
Designed by Rita Lascaro
First edition