The Guilty (8 page)

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.