The Guilty Page 7

  The painter got used to me walking around cleaning things that were already clean. He told me something was souring with the painting. He wanted to disorganize it, but it kept rearranging itself, like it was being pulled from the inside. Magnets, I thought. The colors came together as if drawn by inner forces. I saw a red dot in a bucket of paint and thought about Rosalía’s mole. What would she see in the painting? She had so much imagination, she was sure to find more than I could. I felt something like vertigo and remembered El Chivo’s “method.” Don’t look to the side or down, just straight ahead: your reflection. Deep in the world of the painting, everything vibrated, as if it could recede forever but the colors would remain because they were fighting against it, whatever it was that was falling.

  Signs. It was exciting to sense something that I couldn’t articulate to Rosalía. Then I looked at the glass walls and I saw the climber. The walls were starting to fog up on the outside. He looked blurry. He had suction pads to hold onto the glass.

  The day of the party, we ate Rosalía’s cakes. Our building wore a sombrero and the Kuala Lumpur towers had strange little hats she’d copied out of a magazine. They talked about us on TV. El Chivo and I went up to the roof and lowered down a slice of cake on a rope to Melvin the climber.

  Rosalía stayed on after the party. El Chivo, who was mopping the first floor, told her the same story three times.

  That night Rosalía was affectionate with me in a sad way, like I had just returned from spear-fishing sharks but she really loved me and didn’t care that I smelled bad and was missing an arm.

  “Why didn’t you give it to him?” she asked while I was falling asleep.

  In the early morning I heard crying, or maybe it was one of the karate fighters moaning in my dreams.

  Two days later, El Chivo won the lottery. Jacinto had sold him the winning ticket. Tears ran down his face as he told us he was putting his Pops in a private clinic. There are faces that are ruined when things go well. El Chivo’s was like that. I couldn’t look at him anymore and went out to the street.

  Jacinto came up to me as soon as he saw me. He started talking about El Chivo.

  “I told him those were lucky bills. They smelled like chocolate.”

  So Rosalía knew my secret, the bills that I was saving. She didn’t want to find out what I might use them for. She’d given them to El Chivo like he was one of the Russians in the submarine.

  That night, when I got home, I pointed to the Spiderman. Rosalía came right up to me and bared her neck, showing me a very fine vein, as if she were a small animal that I could kill with a single bite.

  “His pain won me over,” she said later.

  I had gone up and down on the scaffold hearing the same question every day. “Do you know what the sky looks like from a storm drain?” Hearing it once was enough for her.

  She didn’t ask me why I’d been hiding the money. I could have told her it was to go to the sea, but I kept quiet. Maybe she would have preferred to give it to El Chivo anyway.

  I spent the night listening to the sound of airplanes in the sky. I wondered what would happen if I soaked Rosalía with a can of gasoline or if I threw El Chivo off the scaffold. When the sun came up, I was carefully stroking an ice pick.

  The first floor was full of flowers and candles.

  “He fell,” Jacinto said to me.

  I didn’t understand.

  “The goddamn gringo.”

  Three women were crying in the corner where Rosalía’s cake had been.

  I saw a spot on the sidewalk, a stretched spot, a spot with lots of arms and legs, as if the blood had been in a hurry to spill out and fill several bodies.

  I went up to Floor 18. The painter had finished the painting.

  “Can I smell it?” I asked him.

  He let me get my nose up close. It smelled like the world, the world from the inside. I asked him if it had a name.

  “Order Suspended,” he said.

  The building has eight parking lots underground and pilings that sink further down and protect it from earthquakes. Everything floats up from there: “Order Suspended.”

  I looked at the painting and it was like the colors had reorganized themselves. I saw plaster dust under fingernails, three bars of light, the grate, the sky from a storm drain, the golden spires of Kuala Lumpur, the blood mole, the grainy chocolate powder, the sheet over Rosalía’s face, rising and falling with her breath, the black charcoal that had hurt her, the clean circle of a suction cup on glass, the blood stretched out on the sidewalk. I saw the fog in my dream, I saw the earth under the earth, the magnet that pulled everything together like the curve of fate. I wanted something badly without knowing what it was. Someone could paint all of that. I could clean the spots.

  Rosalía had lit candles for the Russian marines. She could love what she had never seen. She could help a mouth with no teeth. El Chivo’s mouth. The climber’s death was going to be worse for her than for me. I didn’t understand what she carried inside that made her like that, but I needed her because of it. I felt the ice pick in the pocket of my overalls.

  “I was going to kill somebody, but somebody else died,” I told the painter.

  That was only half true. I liked the idea of killing El Chivo, but I was going to go up and down with him my whole life without killing him, stroking the ice pick, just like I went up and down before without lending him money.

  The painter looked at me as if he didn’t believe me, or he understood everything, or I was a painting.

  The building’s windows were dirty. Here and there, you could see clean circles: the climber’s suction cups.

  I hung with El Chivo on the scaffold. He said they had hooked his father up to a tube. He described a kind of vacuum capable of blowing into a man, like that was happiness. It’s his fault, his damn fault, I thought, but what I said was:

  “That’s good.”

  He didn’t hear me, or he didn’t know what I meant.

  “Okey dokey!” I shouted to him up there on the scaffold, several times because there was a lot of wind. He seemed to understand that I was resigned or that I believed in luck. I felt like I was pulling a spot out from under my skin.

  That day he didn’t tell the story about his father. When we finished cleaning, he hugged me.

  “Thank you,” he said. The words whistled through his missing teeth. He smelled like Windex and sweat, like we all smell. Then he handed me three blue bills: “Your change.” He smiled.

  Jacinto came up to us on the street. He offered me a lottery ticket. I remembered the title of the painting, Order Suspended. Jacinto had been fucked over to sell fortune, I had lost so someone else could win, and Rosalía had given money without losing anything. “Signs,” I said to myself, and then, for the first time, I played the lotto.

  AMIGOS MEXICANOS

  1. Katzenberg

  The phone rang twenty times. The caller must have been thinking that I live in a villa where it takes forever to get from the stables to the phone, or that there’s no such thing as cordless phones here, or that I experience fits of mystic uncertainty and have a hard time deciding to pick up the receiver. That last one was true, I’m sorry to say.

  It was Samuel Katzenberg. He had come back to Mexico to do a story on violence. Last visit, he’d been traveling on The New Yorker’s dime. Now he was working for Point Blank, one of those publications that perfume their ads and print how-to’s on being a man of the world. It took him two minutes to tell me the move was an improvement.

  “In Spanish, point blank is ‘a quemarropa.’” Katzenberg hadn’t grown tired of showing off how well he spoke the language. “The magazine doesn’t just publish fluff pieces; my editor looks for serious stories. She’s a very cool mujer, a one-woman fiesta. Mexico is magical, but confusing. I need your help to figure out which parts are horrible and which parts are Buñuel-esque.” He tongued the ñ as if he were sucking on a silver bullet and offered me a thousand dollars.

  Then I explained w
hy I was offended.

  Two years earlier, Samuel Katzenberg had come to do his bazillionth story on Frida Kahlo. Someone told him I wrote scripts for “hard-hitting” documentaries, and he’d paid me to escort him through a city he deemed savage and explain things he deemed mythical.

  Katzenberg had read extensively on the heartwrenching work of Mexican painters. He knew more than I did about murals with twenty-foot-long ears of corn, the Museo de la Revolución, the assassination attempt on Trotsky, the fleeting romance between Frida and the Soviet prophet during his exile in Coyoacán. Pedantically, he explained to me the importance of the “wound as a transsexual construct:” the paralyzed painter was sexy in a way that was “very postmodern, beyond gender.” Logically, Madonna admired her without understanding her.

  In preparation for that first trip, Katzenberg had interviewed professors of cultural studies at Brown, Princeton, and Duke. He had done his homework. The next step consisted of establishing definitive contact with Frida’s true country. He hired me to be his contact with the genuine. But it was hard for me to satisfy his appetite for authenticity. In his mind, everything I showed him was either a gaudy farce for tourists, or something ghastly with no local color. He wanted a reality that was like Frida’s paintings, ghastly but unique. Katzenberg didn’t understand that her famous traditional dresses were now only to be found on the second floor of the Museo de Antropología, or worn on godforsaken ranches where they were never as luxurious or finely embroidered. He also didn’t understand that today’s Mexican woman takes pains to wax the honest mustache that, according to him, made F.K. (Katzenberg loved abbreviations) a bisexual icon.

  It didn’t help that nature decided to thrust an environmental disaster into his story. The volcano Popocatépetl had become active again, and we visited Frida’s mansion under a rain of ash. This let me muse with calculated nostalgia on the disappearance of the sky, so central to life in Mexico City.

  “We’ve lost the most transparent region of the air,” I commented, as if pollution also meant the end of Aztec lyricism.

  I’ll admit I stuffed Katzenberg full of clichés and vernacular flashiness. But it was his fault. He wanted to see iguanas in the streets.

  Mexico disappointed him, as if the whole country were some ceremonial site, commercialized and in ruins, full of peddlers hawking tanning oil to sun worshippers.

  I introduced him to an expert on Mexican art and Katzenberg refused to talk with him. I should have quit right then; I couldn’t tolerate working for a racist. Didier Morand was black, from Senegal. He had come to Mexico when then-President Luis Echeverría decided that our countries were deeply alike. Didier wore beaded necklaces and beautiful African tunics. He was a Commissary of Mexican Art, and very few people knew as much as he did. But Katzenberg was annoyed that he’d honor so many cultures at once.

  “I don’t need an African source.” He looked at me as if I were trying to sell him the wrong ethnicity.

  I decided to cut him down to size: I asked for double the money.

  He accepted, and so I tried my best to find metaphors and adjectives that would bring out the essential Mexico, or something that could represent it in his eyes, so hungry for “genuine” disasters.

  That’s when I introduced him to Gonzalo Erdiozábal.

  Gonzalo looks like a fiery Moor from 1940s Hollywood. He radiates the hyperdignified elegance of a Sultan who’s lost his camels and has no plans to get them back. Or at least, that’s how we see him in Mexico. In Europe, he seems very Mexican. For four years in the 80s, he managed to get himself worshipped in Austria as Xochipili, a supposed descendent of the Emperor Moctezuma. Every morning, he’d go to the Ethnographic Museum of Vienna dressed as an Aztec dancer, light copal incense, and ask for signatures supporting the repossession of Moctezuma’s headdress, whose quetzal feathers were languishing there in a glass case.

  In his role as Xochipili, Gonzalo showed the Austrian populace that what they thought of as a charmless gift from Emperor Maximilian was actually a piece of our identity. He gathered enough signatures to bring the issue to Parliament, raising funds from NGOs and winning the boundless devotion of a shifting harem of blondes. Obviously, it would have been a disaster if he’d actually repossessed the headdress. His cause only prospered so long as the Austrians postponed handing it over. He was able to enjoy his “Moctezuma fellowship” without being defeated by the generosity of his adversaries: it was nostalgia that forced him to come back before he could claim the imperial plumes (“I miss the reek of pork rinds and gasoline,” he wrote me.)

  When Katzenberg doubled my salary, I called Gonzalo and offered him one third. Gonzalo cobbled together a fertility rite on a concrete rooftop, and took us to the shack of a splotchy-skinned clairvoyant who made us gnaw on sugarcane so she could read our destinies in the pulp.

  Thanks to Gonzalo’s improvised traditions, Katzenberg found the local color he needed for his story. On our last night together, he had one too many tequilas and confessed that the magazine had given him an expense account fat enough to live for a month, like a king. Gonzalo and I had made it possible for him to “research” everything in just one week.

  The next day, he was back to scrimping. He decided the hotel shuttle was too expensive so he flagged down a parrot-green VW. The taxi driver took him down an alley and held a screwdriver to his jugular. Katzenberg was left with nothing but his passport and his plane ticket, but his flight was canceled because Popocatépetl started erupting and ashes had clogged the planes’ turbines.

  He spent one last day in Mexico City, watching news reports on the volcano, too scared to even go out into the hallway. He called and asked me to come see him. I was afraid he was going to ask me to give him back the money, and even more afraid I’d offer it to him. I told him I was busy because a witch had put the evil eye on me.

  I felt bad for Katzenberg, long distance, until he sent me a copy of the story he’d written. The title’s vulgar pun wasn’t the worst of it: “There She Blows: Frida and the Volcano.” I was in the piece, described as “one of the locals.” Somehow, though he hadn’t deigned to dignify me with a name, Katzenberg had included every word I’d said, unhampered by quotation marks or scruples. His story was a pillage of my ideas. His only originality consisted in having discovered them himself (and only when I read the story did I realize all I had come up with). The story concluded with something I’d said about green salsa and the painful chromatics of the Mexican people. For half the price, they could have gotten the same article from me. But we live in a colonial world, and the magazine needed the august signature of Samuel Katzenberg. Plus, I don’t write articles.

  2. Burroughs

  The star reporter’s return to Mexico tested both my patience and my dignity. How dare he call me?

  I told him I had no aspirations to protagonism; I was just sick of Americans taking advantage of us. Instead of translating Monsiváis or Mejía Madrid, they sent a cretin who got the Madonna treatment just because he wrote in English. The planet had turned into a new Babel where nobody could understand anybody else, but the important thing was to not understand anybody else in English. I thought my speech was patriotic, so I went on and on until I got scared I was sounding anti-Semitic.

  “Sorry I didn’t mention you,” Katzenberg said politely on the other end of the line.

  I looked out the window, towards the Parque de la Bola. A little boy had climbed up the enormous cement sphere. He spread his arms, like he was on the top of a mountain. Everyone around him clapped. The Earth had been conquered.

  At night, I like to look at the middle of the traffic circle we call the Parque de la Bola, the Ball Park. The ball is a globe made out of concrete. People lean out over their balconies to look at it. The world as seen by its neighbors.

  My eyes wandered to the computer, covered with Post-its where I jot down “ideas.” At this point, the machine looks like a domesticated Xipe Totec, the Aztec flayed god. Each “idea” is a layer of skin from Our Flayed Fathe
r. Instead of writing the script about syncretism I’d already cashed an advance on, I was constructing a monument to the topic.

  Katzenberg was trying to win me over.

  “The copy editors obliterated crucial adjectives; you know how cutthroat journalism is. Editors over there are not like the ones in Mexico, they’re vicious with the red pen, they change everything on you. . . .”

  While he was talking, I was thinking about Cristi Suárez. She had left an indelible message on my answering machine. “How’s it going with the script? I dreamed about you last night. A nightmare with low-budget slasher effects. You behaved yourself, though: you were the monster, not the one who was chasing me but the one who was saving me. Don’t forget we need the first draft by Friday. Thanks for saving me. Kiss kiss.”

  Listening to Cristi is a delectable destruction. I love her proposals on topics I don’t like. For her, I’ve written scripts on genetically modified corn and Brahman cattle ranching. Even though the work is a pretext to get closer to her, I still haven’t taken the final step. And it’s because up until now, unlikely as it may sound, my best quality has been my scripts. She met me when I was horrendously drunk, but even so, or maybe because of it, she considered me capable of writing a documentary exposing the dangers of transgenic grains. Ever since, she’s talked to me as if our previous project had won an Oscar and now we were just gunning for prestige at Cannes. The latest episode of her enthusiasm led me to syncretism. “We Mexicans are pure collage,” she said. It’s hard to believe, but spoken by her, it sounded sublime.

  I’d disconnected my answering machine because I wasn’t sure I could handle another message from Cristi and her magnificent nightmares. Sometimes I wonder what I’d have to lose by telling her once and for all that I couldn’t care less about syncretism and the only collage I’m interested in is her. But then I remember she likes to take care of people. She thinks of herself as a nurse. Maybe the scripts are the therapy she’s assigned to me and all she wants is for me to take my medicine. But the good monster thing sounds racy, almost pornographic. Although it would be more pornographic if she congratulated me on being the bad monster. The soul of a woman is a complicated thing.