The Guilty Page 5

  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).

  Though there is no greater relief than knowing someone else has encountered the same predicament and developed home remedies, I was too ashamed to talk about it. I was experiencing the anxiety of having to face a pregnancy or an enraged husband, plus the fact that my accomplice was distracted by extraterrestrial intrigue, when El Tomate suggested we take a trip. I accepted on the spot.

  Karla decided to ride in the back seat because she had read The System of Objects by Baudrillard and that part of the car made her feel “deliciously dependent.” In every other way she was a pro-independence fury. She wouldn’t accept our schedules, nor did she believe that the highway had the number of miles indicated on the map.

  Luckily she was asleep for a good part of the trip. In one of the backwater towns, we bought the iguana.

  When Karla woke up, near Pinotepa Nacional, she saw the iguana, and we dropped a few notches in her esteem. There are King Kong men, obsessed with blondes, and then there are Godzilla men, obsessed with monsters. The former complex is racial, the latter phallic. We had bought a dinosaur to our own scale. For fifty miles, she tried to explain what was authentic and what wasn’t.

  Karla had a strange way of scratching her belly, very slowly, as if she wasn’t soothing her stomach but her hand. She lifted up her shirt enough to reveal a tattoo like a second navel in the shape of a yin-yang.

  Once we got to Oaxaca, the iguana stuc
k out its tongue, round as a peanut. Karla suggested we give it something to eat and El Tomate got to use the inscrutable saying: “Now we’ll know which side the iguana chews on.” We had all heard it before, without ever trying to understand it.

  We bought dried flies in a tropical fish store, then left the iguana in the car with a ration of insects that it either ate or lost on the floor.

  It was two in the afternoon, and El Tomate picked a restaurant he had written epic poems about without ever having been there. It was hard to get Karla to accept a table. All of them violated some aspect of feng shui. We ate on the patio, next to a well that would give us energy. Karla practiced “mystical decor.” That’s what her business card said, from when she had lived in Cancún. She had just moved to Mexico City and El Tomate had put her up. She was the daughter of an acquaintance who had gotten pregnant at 16. From the moment my friend greeted me, making a gun with his forefinger and thumb, I knew the trip was an excuse to get into Karla’s pants.

  El Tomate’s morality runs in zig-zags. He would have considered it an abuse to sleep with his guest in Mexico City, but not in Oaxaca and Yucatán.

  I didn’t want to eat yellow mole and El Tomate accused me of hating authenticity. It’s possible that I hate authenticity; either way, I hate yellow food. When he went to the bathroom, Karla turned her hyperobjective interest to me. “And how are you doing now?” she asked. I supposed that El Tomate had told her about a tremendous “before.” She paused and added, in a complicit tone, “I get the iguana thing.”

  Emotions are confusing. I liked that she looked at me as if I were a piece of moveable furniture. I acknowledged that I had had some rough times, but said I was now doing better. I talked to the crumbs on her plate. Then I looked up at her chestnut eyes. She ruined her smile by saying, “He worries about you a lot.” Of course she meant El Tomate. It bothered me that he could become a pronoun and take advantage of my deterioration to play the caring friend. What had he told Karla? That I voluntarily committed myself to the San Rafael Psychiatric Institute while he danced revolutionary Chilean cuecas with Sonia? That much was true. Plus, in the search for pre-Raphaelite exaltation, I had started on a fast that led me to semi-dementia. But El Tomate had invented other eccentricities. Karla spoke to me like the Yaquí Indian Don Juan to Carlos Castaneda: “Everyone has his inner animal.” She touched my hand with compassion.

  There was a classical music festival going on in Oaxaca City and we could only find one room for the three of us, in a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of town, near the Tule Tree. We saw the centuries-old trunk in whose knots Italo Calvino had discovered an intricate alphabet, and in which a guide found other representations. “There is Olga Breeskin’s backside,” he said and pointed to something that looked like the exaggerated posterior of a vedette.

  The iguana passed through various stages. In its Oaxaca phase, its only thought was to flee from us. There were two beds in the room: a double that Karla assigned to us, and hers. The armoire was a solid monstrosity from the era of the Mexican Revolution. No amount of feng shui could move it. That’s where the iguana slept, or more accurately, that’s where we wanted it to sleep. In the middle of the night, I heard the scratching of claws. I went to the armoire and saw that the iguana had disappeared. Something told me it wasn’t in the room. The door had a rope-tie instead of a lock. I know there’s no logic to my reasoning, but a door tied closed with a rope suggests a multitude of problems. I went out into the hall, which led to the only bathroom in the hotel. I found the iguana in the toilet. Had it gone there to drink water? According to El Tomate, iguanas hydrate with certain fruits we had not found but which did apparently exist. The iguana slipped between my legs. I chased it with the intensity of an insomniac, forgetting I hadn’t the slightest interest in capturing it. I found it in the foyer, next to a copy of a sculpture from Mitla, an old man in a funerary pose. Maybe that squatting priest reminded it of its old owner; the fact is, it stayed still and I was able to trap it. It bit me hard enough to draw blood. I squeezed its snout closed like I was wringing out a towel and returned to the room with my prey. El Tomate had taken the opportunity to jump into Karla’s bed, but when I opened the door everything was just as quiet and as un-feng shui as before I had left.

  In the morning, the bite appeared on my hand in a charismatic manner. It looked like I had pricked myself with thorns made of light. Karla got wonderfully concerned and put Tiger Pomade on me.

  I called Gloria that morning to see if there was any news of the “fantastic voyager.” “Not yet,” she answered sourly. She was furious because she had lost her passport. She blamed me for never committing to anything. She didn’t have the slightest interest in my commitment to the condom lost in her interior—what she wanted was for me to commit to finding her passport.

  On our last trip, we were warned. “They’re going to mug you in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.” That time we were traveling by bus, The Turquoise Arrow or Star of the Morning line. They mugged us right there on the bus. One man threatened the driver with a machete while the other went through our pockets. I remember his bloodshot eyes and the mezcal on his breath when he said, “It’s your lucky day. Just imagine, you could’ve gone off a cliff.”

  This time around, they mugged us without our realizing it. We were pumping gas in the mountains. It was nighttime; Karla and the iguana were sleeping in the back of the car. El Tomate was staring out into infinity from the front seat.

  The gas station attendant asked me if I was going to Yucatán and began to tell me a legend. The Jaguar has spots on his body because he bit into the sun. When he had finished up all the light in Oaxaca, he went on to Yucatán, but he couldn’t keep eating fire because a Mayan prince fought him and the two of them drowned together in the sacred cenote. Their bodies floated through the underground rivers of the peninsula until they reached the sea. That’s why the Caribbean has those strange phosphorescent lights. We Mexicans don’t know that the phosphorescence is valuable, but the Japanese come in boats to steal it. The story lasted long enough for the attendant’s accomplices to make off with my rear lights. El Tomate didn’t notice anything because he was “thinking about time.”

  We took the highway out of the mountains, heading east. Every so often a semi passed me, honking alarmingly. I only connected this to the lack of rear lights when we got to the hotel in Villahermosa and I went to check the car. “What kind of idiot are you?” I asked El Tomate. I didn’t notice the theft either, but at least I had been busy listening to the Mayan legend. Why would the Japanese want marine phosphorescence? Is it nutritious? I thought about how easy it is to trick someone like me. Strangely, I thought better of El Tomate. He looked at me with disarming sadness. “Can I tell you something?” he asked.

  He didn’t wait for my answer to tell me that before we left Mexico City, he had burned off the warts on his chest. “I felt so old with those warts.” He lifted up his shirt to show me his burns, like some Xipe Totec, the Aztec Flayed God. Obviously he had scorched himself for the benefit of Karla.

  The other news was that the iguana had vanished in the Ithsmus. We took the suitcases and Karla’s water bottles out of the car, but there was no sign of it.

  In Villahermosa, we stayed in a couple of bungalows with terraces. Every so often, a waiter would come by to offer us a drink. Karla went to bed early because she was exhausted from sleeping through the highway’s winding curves.

  El Tomate and I smoked a couple of dry cigars we had bought from a man selling paper flowers. We drank rum until very late. We had reached that friendly lethargy in which it’s acceptable to not say anything at all. We could hear crickets, night birds, and, very far off, the satisfying sound of insects frying themselves on an electric lantern. El Tomate broke the peace: “Why don’t you go get her?”

  I thought he was talking about the iguana, but his eyes were fixed on Karla’s bungalow. He scratched his bare chest. I stared at the ruddy stains. “They put liquid nitrogen on me,” he explained, li
ke a futuristic martyr. He had burned himself to impress Karla, his warts had smoldered in a sacrificial rite, but now he was asking me to go after her. “It’s obvious she likes you. She hasn’t moved a single chair in two days,” his words came out bitterly, like the last mouthful of bad tobacco.

  It had always been depressing to imagine my friend in his apartment next to the traffic off the Viaduct, writing about Roman churches and Sicilian ruins. Now there was nothing sadder than seeing him on this trip, devastatingly real.

  “We already know which side the iguana chews on,” he added with a resigned smile.

  When I got back to the room, something shifted inside me. The poverty of the scene—the tiny Rosa Venus soap, the rusty bottle opener, the ashtray bearing the name of some other hotel—made me realize that I was also in a bad state. It upset me that El Tomate would encourage me to approach Karla. I remembered the time he was carrying around the sound equipment for the band Aztlán. He took advantage of his privileged access to that music (flutes played in outrage over squalor) to sleep with Sonia. Now he was offering me a different woman to make up for his disloyalty. Or maybe he was playing another hand, maybe he needed to take advantage of the trip, to secure the possibility of complaining about me in the future. If I slept with Karla, his subsequent blackmail could be implacable, a rarefied cruelty, like the mood of a Mayan god.

  He was right about one thing: Karla had stopped moving the furniture around, and not just that: at every restaurant she opened the packets of saltines, spread butter on them, and passed them to me without asking.

  I washed myself in the dribble of water that fell from the showerhead. It was the prelude to a disastrous journey. We visited the ruins of Palenque. The guide wanted us to see the carving of an “astronaut” in the inner chamber of a pyramid. The “controls” of the “ship” were ears of corn.