The Guilty (14 page)

“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,

“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:

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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