The Guilty Page 6

  “Nothing is authentic,” muttered El Tomate. The whole day, he kept looking at me as if I had just emerged from the bungalow he had told me to enter.

  Karla noticed something was wrong between us and distracted herself by humming an indecipherable melody. We rushed through the brick ruins of Comalcalco, ate alligator-headed fish without acknowledging the strange flavor, and made our way towards the mesa of Mayan kings.

  We were passing through a region of dry shrubs crowned with purple flowers when a strange rattling came from the front hood of the car. I thought it was the belt, or one of the many parts of the motor I didn’t understand.

  When I raised the hood in front of us, Karla embraced me, kissed me. And there was the iguana, looking at us with prehistoric patience, its tail beating against the spark plugs like a metronome. The animal was hot, but I trapped it with the anxiousness that Karla had stirred up.

  In Maní, I checked out the car while they drank horchatas. The iguana had made a hole in the back of the rear seat. From there, it got into the chassis and made its way to the motor. The animal represented my karma, my aura, my very being. It was also gnawing holes in my car.

  We visited the Temple of San Miguel de Maní, where Fray Diego de Landa ordered the Mayan codices to be burned. The cosmogony of a people had gone up in sententious flames. I told Karla about the things that are lost and the things that remain. The iguana belonged in this setting, like the burned codices. It had to reintegrate itself into this reality. I didn’t need it anymore. Karla gave me a highly charged look, the kind you give someone who has been hospitalized because of guilt or complicity with his inner animals. In front of Karla, El Tomate had turned me into an interesting case of fantastical zoology. I looked up at the Yucatecan sky, pure blue, and felt I was able to talk about creative loss. After burning the codices, Fray Diego wrote the history of the Mayans. I would make a similar restitution. The liberation of the iguana would allow me to break through my writer’s block. I had a cycle of poems in mind, “The Green Circle,” an allusion to the iguana biting its own tail and the Mayans inventing the zero. “You only possess the things you lose voluntarily,” I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud because it was pedantic and because El Tomate was watching me from a distance, making a gun with his forefinger and thumb. This time, the gesture meant he approved of my proximity to Karla.

  We arrived at the Yucatán phase of the iguana. If in Oaxaca it had wanted to flee, now it wanted to be with us. We unsuccessfully freed it in front of the Church of the Three Kings of Tizimín; among the pale stones of the immense atrium of Izamal; under the laurel trees in the Mérida’s main square. It wasn’t drawn to the greenery that surrounded the cenote at Dzibilchaltún either. It kept coming back to us, domesticated by our delicious flies, by the Chevy and its innumerable holes. “Animals hate authenticity,” I told El Tomate.

  That afternoon I called Gloria. “It finally came out,” she told me. I felt a cosmic relief. She, however, was not in a good mood. “Now I want to know which part of me my passport is going to come out of.” I knew that the only thing that tied us together were the problems I could cause her.

  When I hung up, I saw Karla in the distance, standing on a rock. Her silhouette had a strange immobility. Her body, agile and tense, didn’t seem to be at rest; she was gathering energy to jump.

  Near the archeological site of Chichén Itzá, we found a little hotel that was part of a Brahman cattle ranch. We had been driving the whole afternoon, facing into the sun. El Tomate had a tremendous migraine. He went to bed early and Karla said to me, “I thought of a name for the iguana.”

  I put my finger on her lips so she wouldn’t say “Odysseus” or “Xóchitl” or “Tao.” She kissed me softly. That night I caressed her yin-yang tattoo until morning.

  I went back to my room when dawn broke. I saw fragile trees with intricate fronds. A blue bird was singing in the branches. The white cattle were grazing on the flat land. I felt happy and guilty. By the time I got back to my room, I just felt guilty. I had pushed El Tomate into the water because I could never stand that Sonia preferred him to me; he’d had the decency to forgive me, and I had paid him back in false coin. To top it off, I had remembered that it was him who got me into that Silvio Rodríguez concert. El Tomate felt old. It had been years since he’d had a stable relationship, he had burned off his warts like a punitive Aztec. I thought about different ways to approach him. They were all unnecessary: he had slipped a note under the door. “I understand. I would have done the same thing. We’ll see each other in Mexico City.” That note situated him mysteriously beside us, as if he had been spying on us the whole night.

  I visited Chichén Itzá in a zombie state. Karla told me she knew I was in love with her when she caught me staring strangely while we ate buñuelos outside the Santo Domingo Convent in Oaxaca. The truth is, I was looking at her strangely because the iguana was insisting on biting me in the same place it had already bitten me.

  We climbed the 91 stairs of the Pyramid of Kukulcán; neither the heat nor the exertion impeded conversation. She told me she had left Cancún because she was sick of her suitors. Then she pointed at a gringo in a Hawaiian shirt who hadn’t stopped taking pictures of her. She felt harassed by the unfulfilled desires of others. Only El Tomate, who was old and a consummate gentleman, had treated her with egalitarian friendship.

  When we got to the cenote, I felt even worse. El Tomate had drunk the water, but the prophecy of returning was being fulfilled by me. Perhaps wrongful immersion brings about such consequences.

  In that moment, I hated archeological guides. They were like deep sea fish. They had swollen eyelids and talked about things they didn’t understand. There were so many, it was impossible not to hear what came out of their heads, so full of murky water. At the Tzompantli, the Place of Skulls, one of the guides said that the Mayans brought iguanas on their journeys. They skinned them alive because meat rots quickly in the heat of Yucatán. On the steps of the sacbé, the white road that joins the sacred cities, they would tear off chunks of meat and continue traveling. As long as the iguana’s heart kept beating, they could eat bits of its body. Then they ate the heart. The guide smiled with his fishy teeth.

  I felt a hole in my stomach. Karla painstakingly bit her nails. I bought green mangos but she didn’t want to try them. We saw the delicate skulls of the Tzompantli, the stone writing of those legible buildings in a language that had been lost. I thought about the bleeding iguana that fed the Mayan pilgrims. A sensation of loss, of diffuse horror came over me. The iguana followed us, our unlikely pet. I remembered how much I owed El Tomate. In his way, he wanted to do me a favor by disappearing at dawn like the Lone Ranger. Karla looked at the sky to avoid seeing the iguana. “The guides lie,” I told her. “They’re blind fish.” She didn’t ask me to explain. She must have been thinking something terrible; her body shook, stuck in a shudder. Maybe it wasn’t the Mayan cruelty that shocked her so much as the effect of the story, the way in which it intersected our journey. El Tomate had sold me to her as an attractive problem he couldn’t fully fathom, or one which had already exceeded him. She lifted my hand off her shoulder. “I have to think,” she said, as if ideas came to her through touch.

  By the time we got to the cenote, it was getting dark. The iguana changed course when it saw four or five members of its own species on the wet earth surrounding the pool. There, it left us.

  The Chevy was waiting in the parking lot. I thought about the things that are destroyed so that poetry can exist. I thought about Yeats and the impossible, sacrificial love of Celts. I thought about my inability to sink deep like the dusk.

  Karla wanted to sit in the back seat. I asked her to sit next to me. This time she did not cite The System of Objects. “It’s the seat of death,” she said. “I’m not your chauffeur,” I answered sharply. Scared, she obeyed.

  We crashed three curves outside of Chichén Itzá. The brakes didn’t respond. The cables had been gnawed straight through. Karla broke
two ribs, puncturing her lung. The Chevy was totaled. I was unhurt except for the bite I already had on my hand.

  Sometimes I think Karla stopped talking to me because I was unharmed, and that gave intentionality to the accident. Too many times she said, “It wasn’t your fault.” Everything had been wrong from before we’d entered the car, or from a moment before that, already irrecoverable. What design were we fulfilling when we shared our breath and believed we could search for ourselves in two bodies?

  I tried in vain to write “The Green Circle.” Over long afternoons, the only thing I did was sketch an animal.

  El Tomate published his report with stupendous photos of Oaxaca and Yucatán. When I read it, I remembered the nape of Karla’s neck, the skin on her back glowing in that light that only exists on the peninsula.

  That night, I saw her in my dreams. I asked her what the iguana’s name was, but I didn’t dream her answer.

  ORDER SUSPENDED

  For Manuel Felguérez

  Rosalía has more than enough to worry about. She lights a candle for the Russians trapped in their submarine (they were communicating by banging a metal door with their tools, they didn’t have much oxygen left, and the sea was freezing). She’s like that. She prays for Russians she doesn’t know, who won’t be saved.

  I hate spots. I huffed too much glue in high school and one night I understood that the spots on my arms were spiders embedded in my skin. I tried to cut them out with a knife. My father kicked me in the face and saved me. He also broke my jaw. They wired it shut and I spent weeks drinking soup through a straw. Quitting glue isn’t easy. You wake up and your fingernails are full of plaster dust from scratching the walls all night. “Only pain makes you feel better,” my father told me. It’s true. His kick put me on a new path. I didn’t go back to school, where the teacher had told us, “Study, boys, or you’ll end up being journalists.” I wanted to sink down into journalism. Instead, I rose up on a scaffold as a window cleaner.

  In front of the building, Jacinto sours life with his lottery tickets. He fell off a scaffold centuries ago. Now he’s a gimp promising good fortune. I’ve seen blind men, crippled men, hunchbacked men selling lottery tickets— like they were fucked over so you could win. None of them ever buys a ticket.

  The building is intelligent. The lights go on when you walk down a hallway; in the elevator, a voice says the names of the floors and the companies that occupy them. The voice is sexy and cold. A soldier woman. “The building sees more signs than you do,” Rosalía complains. She thinks I’m insensitive: “You’re fuckin’ deprived.” I’m too deprived to see the things that interest her, but I did notice that the elevator voice talks just like a warrior woman I saw on TV. The Japanese listened to her, closed their eyes, and took delight in dying.

  “You don’t see signs,” she insists.

  “Signs of what?” I ask.

  “Signs of anything.”

  Rosalía smells like something ocean-y, foamy. The sheet rises over her nose when she sleeps. I’ve been collecting 20 peso bills for years. I stick them in a plastic Spiderman doll I won in a raffle. It came full of powdered hot chocolate. The doll reminds Rosalía that one afternoon I had good aim. I think about the blue bills inside it, a tight sea, held in place.

  * * *

  I don’t like the city from the scaffold but I like that it’s behind me. A vibrating mass. Every scaffold has two operators. I go up and down with a guy we call El Chivo, the Goat. El Chivo smokes all day. He smokes because inside the building there’s no smoking and because the cigarettes are called Wings.

  El Chivo is a veteran. The first day he explained what he calls “the method:” You shouldn’t look down or to the side; what you should watch is your own face in the glass. That’s what you’re cleaning, your reflection.

  It’s almost impossible to see through the glass because of the reflective coating. Sometimes I look and look and I see something inside. That’s how I spotted the painter in the meeting room on Floor 18. He was standing in front of a huge white canvas. I saw him put the first spot on it. I hate spots, as I said before, but I couldn’t stop staring at the black paint beginning to drip. I felt strange, like those spots were the sins I carried inside me. I wanted to clean them like I wanted to get the spiders out from under my skin. Then the painter started to use other colors. All earth tones, but very different. How many colors make up the Earth? I calmed myself by staring at a spot that was rusted. Like mud made from rotted metal toys. I looked so hard I thought a blood spot might appear in the white of my eye, like the one Rosalía has. It’s a mole. Sometimes she says it appeared on its own, other times she says a piece of charcoal fell into her eye when she was a girl. I think she saw something she’s not telling me about. That’s why she looks at things like they’re signs.

  “It’s abstract,” El Chivo said, as if he could see better from his part of the scaffold. “Do you know what abstract is?”

  I didn’t answer him. I know I don’t see signs. That’s what abstract is.

  “Don’t you think it’s nuts that spots get a name? One spot isn’t called anything, but a bunch of spots get a title.” He pointed to the painting through the glass.

  El Chivo never stops talking, like his tongue is full of spines he can’t quite spit out.

  “Together the spots mean more than just spots.”

  “Spot on!” I said.

  He kept talking. He needs so many words to tell a story that’s always the same: when he was a boy his father used to lock him down in a storm drain.

  “Do you know what the sky looks like from a storm drain?” he asks me and I always tell him I don’t. “It’s three lines. A grate.” Then he smiles, and even though he’s missing teeth, he looks happy up there on the scaffold. The storm drain made him happy to be outside. That’s his real method. The fucked up part of the story is that now he works to support his “Pops” who trapped him in the storm drain. El Chivo doesn’t have a wife or kids. Not even a dog to wag its tail at him. He lives for his Pops who gulps down money and medicine. El Chivo is always asking to borrow cash. He comes to me with his tongue hanging out, like he can smell the money I keep in the Spiderman. A goddamn dog for money. You can treat him bad and say no a thousand times and he still hangs out his tongue.

  Sometimes I dream about karate-fight fog. The men are fighting in a cold part of Japan. I’m their guru. They kneel before me. I give each of them a different cleaning product to smell. That’s how I decide who beats the shit out of whom, and how.

  I woke up and saw a mold spot on the ceiling. It was shaped like Alaska. Why do mold spots have shapes? If not Alaska, they look like Australia. I had a thought that the painter was painting against those types of spots. He wanted to make spot-spots that couldn’t be anything else. Not spider-spots or geography-spots.

  The next day the wind blew so hard it made the scaffold creak. I’ve never seen a bird fly as high up as we are. They float down below. They look like black garbage pushed by the wind.

  Outside the 18th floor, I leaned in to see the painting. The painter moved his spots around and then, when he backed up to view them, they moved a little more, like they weren’t fixed, or like they were going to burst. One part was as brown and powdery as the chocolate I removed from the Spiderman. I closed my eyes and saw the sea. Rosalía was sinking slowly, wrapped in a plant with Jell O like leaves.

  I descended half asleep. The Chief Intendant was waiting for us. The news he had was splitting his face with happiness. He took us into the lobby. People eyed our harnesses with great respect. There was a feeling like something was about to happen. On one screen, a video was being projected. A gringo named Melvin was going to climb our building. He was training to climb the Kuala Lumpur Towers. Our building was the height of the “knee” of Kuala Lumpur. He would have to climb ours several times to be prepared. They asked him why he didn’t climb mountains and he said, “Buildings are more virgin.” Then we saw the sharp, golden towers, like sky-high pagodas that fed on ligh
t: “Kuala Lumpur.”

  The Chief Intendant informed us that we would spend a week inside the building, clearing the terrain for the climber. They sent me to clean the meeting room; El Chivo was assigned the first floor.

  The Chief knows Rosalía. I got the job because he’s the compadre of someone in the neighborhood who admires Rosalía. The Chief doesn’t admire me. “With any luck, he’ll fall.” That’s how he told her he was giving me the job.

  They announced there would be a party for the employees. TV crews were coming to promote our building. Rosalía was going to participate, too. She works in a bakery and our night watchman recommended it. We were going to cut one cake shaped like the Kuala Lumpur Towers and another shaped like our building.

  Rosalía had counted the days the Russians were in the submarine, until they asphyxiated at the bottom of the sea. She worries about far away things. You ask her how she’s doing and you never know if she’s answering for herself.

  That week, Rosalía could only think about the climber, about how he might die for something meaningless. They are no Olympics for building climbing. Melvin was risking his life just because. Afterwards, everyone would forget about him like they had with the Russians in the submarine.

  * * *

  Rosalía made an enormous cake. We were going to eat cake simply because someone had dared to dangle above us. I liked seeing her so worked up, thinking about her cake and the moments when strangers sink with no hope, or climb very high with no explanation. Then I thought about our trip to the sea. A surprise isn’t exactly a sign, but at least I would give her something unexpected.

  What I liked most about working inside the building was looking at the tower across the street. Made out of glass. Almost invisible. Only the orange sparkle of the sun revealed where the glass stopped and the air began.

  I wanted to light a cigarette but didn’t dare. The painter, they let smoke. He puffed on cigar tobacco that he put in a pipe. He likes to turn one thing into another. His spots had turned into blocks. They looked like a map. A map without geography.