The Guilty (5 page)

One night we went to the Nefertiti to dance, with Patricio and the country singer. I remember it better than my debut in the Premier League. A sarcophagus appeared in the middle of the dance floor, and out of it came a spectacular woman, completely naked. She floated over to Patricio, who was drinking Diet Coke, and pulled him up to dance. I stared intently at the hieroglyphics tattooed on her back, as if I could decipher them. That's what I was doing when the bomb exploded.

Hours later I opened my eyes and saw a bracelet shaped like a little snake. The woman who'd danced with Patricio had been wearing it. I smelled chemicals. There was a bottle of water near me. I drank desperately, like I do at the end of a match. I tried to move, but pain shot through my right leg. Then I heard a whistle.

I learned from the papers that I was rescued two days after the explosion. I spent a week in the hospital. Nati didn't visit me. One of her friends told me she'd found a job in Las Vegas.

Maybe Patricio had been the target of the bomb, the crack midfielder showing off and tempted by other teams. Did the triplets need a martyr, or was it someone else trying to fuck them over? The only certain thing was that Patricio had made it out of the explosion unharmed.
While I was in rehab rolling a bottle under my foot, he had started to shine with Toltecas.

The Toucans were sold and my contract was auctioned off for a piddling amount. When Estrella Azul bought me, the papers called it “A Sentimental Recruit.” In the locker room, though, nobody knew I was back because of sentimentality. Here was the star my fortune cookie had promised.

That's when Lupillo said that ghosts come out of nowhere and the dead just come back. I'd gone to Mexicali to find the end, but as the sportscasters put it, “It's not over till it's over.” When can something with no finish line ever come to an end?

I missed the waterfall that never stopped falling. I missed having a crazy board of directors that paid me the same wage as a tiger. I missed the desert where it didn't matter that there was nobody around to see me. I missed Nati's hands after they folded something very precisely, then touched my calcified flesh and I felt them, gentle and cold. The best thing about Nati was that I never knew why she was with me. It could have been a horrendous reason, but she never told me what it was.

It took me a while to get back into the rhythm of things. I went to a doctor's office opposite Gate 6 of Estrella Stadium. I became a fan of electric massages, and then I became a fan of Marta, a dark-skinned girl who touched me with the tips of her fingers more than was strictly necessary, barely grazing me with her long nails. The first time I made love to her, she confessed she was in love with Patricio. That detail had stopped surprising me. Sooner or later, they all asked: “Did he really save your life?”

Yes, Patricio had saved me. He had searched for me in the ruins of the Nefertiti alongside the firefighters, while in Mexico City they were already performing my funeral mass. He was still Argentinian, but even my parrot missed him.

Around that time, people were talking about the triplets. How they were killed with dynamite. They had only identified one, by his Che tattoo. But the other two had also been there. The police knew this because they'd counted the teeth in the rubble. The triplets died next to a warehouse full of contraband Chinese toys.

I remember the day they came to visit me with the case of beer. “We rise like foam,” they'd told me. They were younger than me. Their bodies had swollen up as if they knew they wouldn't live very long. All three of them, as if they had made a pact to inflate together.

Against every prediction, Estrella Azul made it to the finals against Toltecas. Patricio called to wish me luck. Then, casually, he added:

“The board of directors needs new recruits. They put a price on my contract.”

Every three or four years, Toltecas overhauls their roster. No other team makes as much in commissions. People like the triplets blow up. People like us get traded.

The first leg ended in a dirty 0-0. Patricio was kicked viciously. The referee turned out to be my parrot's vet. He hated Argentinians. He didn't call the fouls made on my friend. Even I gave Patricio a few extra kicks.

I don't know what that second leg looked like from the outside. I never saw it on TV. For me, that afternoon marked the end of soccer, though movement remained
an unending agony. We were 0-0 at minute 88. You could smell the disappointment of a final gone to penalties. Patricio had played like a ghost. We'd kicked him too much in the first match.

Suddenly, I swept the ball away and kept it. It was as if everything was spinning and the sun was beating down from inside me. There was a shattering silence, like when I woke half dead in the Nefertiti. I looked up, not at the field, but at the sky. Then I saw the grass all around me; an island, the very last island. It was like breaking open a fortune cookie. Everything stopped: the water in the electric waterfall, the sweat on the triplets' cheeks, Nati's hands on my back, the twelve teams who'd kicked me, the red, white and green jersey I never got to wear, the needle feeling for my nerves. And then I saw nothing, just the desert, the only place I could make a backwards play.

I heard a whistle. Patricio was open on the forward line. I saw his jersey, an enemy to both of us. I passed him the ball.

He was alone in front of the goalie, but simply scoring wasn't enough for him. He launched a beautiful little curve shot that caressed the ball towards the corner. I admired this, the play I'd never been capable of making, which was now just as much mine as the jeers and insults and cups of beer they threw at me, and which finally meant something different.

I walked off the field and started my life.

THE GUILTY

The shears lay on the table. They were enormous. My father had used them to butcher chickens. Since his death, Jorge has carried the shears with him everywhere. Maybe it's normal for a psychopath to sleep with a gun under his pillow. My brother isn't a psychopath. He isn't normal, either.

I found him in the bedroom, doubled over, struggling to pull off his T-shirt. It was 108 degrees. Jorge was wearing a shirt made of coarse cloth, the kind that sticks to you like a second skin.

“Open it up!” he shouted, his head swaddled in fabric. He gestured vaguely to the weakest point in the weave; a part I had no trouble finding.

I got the shears and cut his shirt. I eyed the tattoo on his back. It annoyed me that the shears were good for
something. Jorge made senseless things useful; for him, that's what having talent meant.

He embraced me as if being anointed with his sweat was some kind of baptism. Then he looked at me with eyes sunken by drugs, suffering, too many movies. He had energy to spare, an inconvenient thing on a summer afternoon on the outskirts of Sacramento. His last visit, Jorge had kicked the fan and broken off one of its blades. Now the machine made a noise like a baby's rattle and barely nudged the air. Not one of us six brothers thought about replacing it. The farm was being sold. It still smelled like birds; white feathers still hung on the barbed wire.

I had proposed a different place for us to meet, but Jorge needed something he called “accordance.” We had all lived there once, crammed in. We read the Bible at meals, scaled the roof to watch shooting stars. We were beaten with the rake used to scrape up chicken shit, dreamed about running away and returning to burn the house down.

“Come with me.” Jorge went out to the porch. He had arrived in a Windstar minivan, a real luxury for him.

He pulled two buckled cases out of the van. He was so thin that in the absurd immensity of the desert, it looked like he was holding scuba tanks. They were typewriters.

He put them at opposite ends of the dining room table and assigned me the one with the stuck ñ-key. For weeks, we would sit face to face. Jorge imagined himself a screenwriter. He had a contact in Tucson, which isn't exactly the Mecca of cinema, a gringo who was interested in a “raw story” that apparently we could tell. The
Windstar and a two-thousand-dollar advance were proof of his interest.

The gringo believed in Mexican cinema as in a quintessential guacamole. There was too much hatred and passion at the border not to exploit it on-screen. In Arizona, farmers shot at migrants lost on their land (“a hot safari,” the man had said; Jorge made him sound like an evangelist). Then, the unlikely producer had mixed a red margarita. “Mexican essence,” he said, “rests among a pile of corpses.”

The gringo's greatest extravagance was trusting my brother. Jorge's filmmaker training consisted of driving American drug addicts around the Oaxaca coasts. They told him about movies we had never seen in Sacramento. When he moved to Torreón, he would go to the video store every day just because it had air conditioning. They hired him to make his presence seem normal and because he could recommend movies he'd never seen.

My brother came back to Sacramento with a strange look in his eyes. I was sure it had something to do with Lucía. She had been so bored out here, in this wasteland, that when Jorge returned she gave him a chance. Even back then, when he was still a reasonable weight and had all his teeth, my brother looked like a cosmic nutjob, like someone who'd been abducted by a UFO. Maybe he had the pedigree of a man who's gone great distances; the point is Lucia let him into her house behind the gas station. It was hard to believe someone with Lucía's body and her obsidian eyes couldn't find a better candidate among the truckers who stopped
to pump diesel. Jorge took the luxury of leaving her, as well.

He didn't want to tie himself to Sacramento. But he wore it on his skin: he had shooting stars tattooed on his back, the “Tears of San Fortino” that fall each year on August 12th. It was an incredible spectacle we watched as children. Plus, his middle name is Fortino.

My brother was made for leaving, but also for coming back. He arranged his most recent return by phone. He said our broken lives looked like those of other filmmakers. Latin artists were making it big. The man in Tucson believed in fresh talent. Curiously, the “raw story” was mine; that's why I had a typewriter in front of me.

I had also made it out of Sacramento. For years, I drove semis on both sides of the border. In the shifting landscapes of that period, my only constant was Tecate beer. I joined Alcoholics Anonymous after flipping a truck full of fertilizer in Los Vidrios. I was unconscious on the freeway for hours, breathing in tomato-enhancing chemical powder. Maybe that explains why I took a new job where the suffering seemed gratifying. For four years after that, I delivered I.V. bags to undocumented workers lost in the desert. I ran the routes from Agua Prieta to Douglas, from Sonoyta to Lukeville, from Nogales to Nogales (I rented a room in each of the Nogales, as if I were living in a city and its reflection). I met the
polleros
who smuggled people across the border, Immigration agents, members of the Paisano program. I never saw those who picked up the I.V. bags. The only undocumented people I ever found had already been detained. They were shivering under a blanket. They
looked like Martians. Maybe the coyotes were the only ones who drank the liquid. The sum of all the corpses they find in the desert is called The Body Count. That's the title Jorge picked for the movie.

Loneliness makes you a babbler. After driving alone for ten hours, you gush words. “Being an ex-alcoholic means spinning tales,” someone told me in AA. One night, after the rates went down, I called my brother. I told him a story I couldn't quite make sense of. I was driving down a dirt road when my headlights lit up two yellow silhouettes. Migrants. These ones didn't look like Martians. They looked like zombies. I braked and they put their hands up like I was going to arrest them. When they saw I was unarmed, they screamed for me to save them in the name of the Virgin and for the love of God.
They're crazy,
I thought. They were foaming at the mouth, grabbing at my shirt; they smelled like rotting cardboard.
They're already dead.
This seemed logical to me. One of them begged me to take him anywhere. The other asked for water. I didn't have a canteen. The idea of travelling with dehydrated, crazed migrants made me feel scared or disgusted or something else. But I couldn't leave them there. I told them they could ride in the back. They thought I meant the back seat. I had to use a lot more words to explain that the trunk, the boot, would be their place of travel.

I wanted to get to Phoenix by dawn. When spiny plants scratched the yellow sky, I stopped to take a leak. I didn't hear any sounds from the back. I thought the migrants had suffocated or died of thirst or hunger, but I didn't do anything. I got back in the car.

When we got to the outskirts of Phoenix, I pulled over and crossed myself. I opened the trunk, and saw the motionless bodies and the red-smeared cloth. Then I heard laughter. Only when I noticed the seeds splattered across their shirts did I remember I had been carrying three watermelons. Unbelievably, the migrants had devoured them, rinds and all. They said goodbye with a dazed happiness that left me just as troubled as the thought of accidentally murdering them.