The Guilty (7 page)

Though there is no greater relief than knowing someone else has encountered the same predicament and developed home remedies, I was too ashamed to talk about it. I was experiencing the anxiety of having to face a pregnancy or an enraged husband, plus the fact that my
accomplice was distracted by extraterrestrial intrigue, when El Tomate suggested we take a trip. I accepted on the spot.

Karla decided to ride in the back seat because she had read
The System of Objects
by Baudrillard and that part of the car made her feel “deliciously dependent.” In every other way she was a pro-independence fury. She wouldn't accept our schedules, nor did she believe that the highway had the number of miles indicated on the map.

Luckily she was asleep for a good part of the trip. In one of the backwater towns, we bought the iguana.

When Karla woke up, near Pinotepa Nacional, she saw the iguana, and we dropped a few notches in her esteem. There are King Kong men, obsessed with blondes, and then there are Godzilla men, obsessed with monsters. The former complex is racial, the latter phallic. We had bought a dinosaur to our own scale. For fifty miles, she tried to explain what was authentic and what wasn't.

Karla had a strange way of scratching her belly, very slowly, as if she wasn't soothing her stomach but her hand. She lifted up her shirt enough to reveal a tattoo like a second navel in the shape of a yin-yang.

Once we got to Oaxaca, the iguana stuck out its tongue, round as a peanut. Karla suggested we give it something to eat and El Tomate got to use the inscrutable saying: “Now we'll know which side the iguana chews on.” We had all heard it before, without ever trying to understand it.

We bought dried flies in a tropical fish store, then left the iguana in the car with a ration of insects that it either ate or lost on the floor.

It was two in the afternoon, and El Tomate picked a restaurant he had written epic poems about without ever having been there. It was hard to get Karla to accept a table. All of them violated some aspect
of feng shui.
We ate on the patio, next to a well that would give us energy. Karla practiced “mystical decor.” That's what her business card said, from when she had lived in Cancún. She had just moved to Mexico City and El Tomate had put her up. She was the daughter of an acquaintance who had gotten pregnant at 16. From the moment my friend greeted me, making a gun with his forefinger and thumb, I knew the trip was an excuse to get into Karla's pants.

El Tomate's morality runs in zig-zags. He would have considered it an abuse to sleep with his guest in Mexico City, but not in Oaxaca and Yucatán.

I didn't want to eat yellow mole and El Tomate accused me of hating authenticity. It's possible that I hate authenticity; either way, I hate yellow food. When he went to the bathroom, Karla turned her hyperobjective interest to me. “And how are you doing now?” she asked. I supposed that El Tomate had told her about a tremendous “before.” She paused and added, in a complicit tone, “I get the iguana thing.”

Emotions are confusing. I liked that she looked at me as if I were a piece of moveable furniture. I acknowledged that I had had some rough times, but said I was now doing better. I talked to the crumbs on her plate. Then I looked up at her chestnut eyes. She ruined her smile
by saying, “He worries about you a lot.” Of course she meant El Tomate. It bothered me that he could become a pronoun and take advantage of my deterioration to play the caring friend. What had he told Karla? That I voluntarily committed myself to the San Rafael Psychiatric Institute while he danced revolutionary Chilean
cuecas
with Sonia? That much was true. Plus, in the search for pre-Raphaelite exaltation, I had started on a fast that led me to semi-dementia. But El Tomate had invented other eccentricities. Karla spoke to me like the Yaquí Indian Don Juan to Carlos Castaneda: “Everyone has his inner animal.” She touched my hand with compassion.

There was a classical music festival going on in Oaxaca City and we could only find one room for the three of us, in a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of town, near the Tule Tree. We saw the centuries-old trunk in whose knots Italo Calvino had discovered an intricate alphabet, and in which a guide found other representations. “There is Olga Breeskin's backside,” he said and pointed to something that looked like the exaggerated posterior of a
vedette.

The iguana passed through various stages. In its Oaxaca phase, its only thought was to flee from us. There were two beds in the room: a double that Karla assigned to us, and hers. The armoire was a solid monstrosity from the era of the Mexican Revolution. No amount of
feng shui
could move it. That's where the iguana slept, or more accurately, that's where we wanted it to sleep. In the middle of the night, I heard the scratching of claws. I went to the armoire and saw that the iguana had disappeared. Something told me it wasn't in the room. The
door had a rope-tie instead of a lock. I know there's no logic to my reasoning, but a door tied closed with a rope suggests a multitude of problems. I went out into the hall, which led to the only bathroom in the hotel. I found the iguana in the toilet. Had it gone there to drink water? According to El Tomate, iguanas hydrate with certain fruits we had not found but which did apparently exist. The iguana slipped between my legs. I chased it with the intensity of an insomniac, forgetting I hadn't the slightest interest in capturing it. I found it in the foyer, next to a copy of a sculpture from Mitla, an old man in a funerary pose. Maybe that squatting priest reminded it of its old owner; the fact is, it stayed still and I was able to trap it. It bit me hard enough to draw blood. I squeezed its snout closed like I was wringing out a towel and returned to the room with my prey. El Tomate had taken the opportunity to jump into Karla's bed, but when I opened the door everything was just as quiet and as
un-feng shui
as before I had left.

In the morning, the bite appeared on my hand in a charismatic manner. It looked like I had pricked myself with thorns made of light. Karla got wonderfully concerned and put Tiger Pomade on me.

I called Gloria that morning to see if there was any news of the “fantastic voyager.” “Not yet,” she answered sourly. She was furious because she had lost her passport. She blamed me for never committing to anything. She didn't have the slightest interest in my commitment to the condom lost in her interior—what she wanted was for me to commit to finding her passport.

On our last trip, we were warned. “They're going to mug you in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.” That time we were traveling by bus, The Turquoise Arrow or Star of the Morning line. They mugged us right there on the bus. One man threatened the driver with a machete while the other went through our pockets. I remember his bloodshot eyes and the mezcal on his breath when he said, “It's your lucky day. Just imagine, you could've gone off a cliff.”

This time around, they mugged us without our realizing it. We were pumping gas in the mountains. It was nighttime; Karla and the iguana were sleeping in the back of the car. El Tomate was staring out into infinity from the front seat.

The gas station attendant asked me if I was going to Yucatán and began to tell me a legend. The Jaguar has spots on his body because he bit into the sun. When he had finished up all the light in Oaxaca, he went on to Yucatán, but he couldn't keep eating fire because a Mayan prince fought him and the two of them drowned together in the sacred cenote. Their bodies floated through the underground rivers of the peninsula until they reached the sea. That's why the Caribbean has those strange phosphorescent lights. We Mexicans don't know that the phosphorescence is valuable, but the Japanese come in boats to steal it. The story lasted long enough for the attendant's accomplices to make off with my rear lights. El Tomate didn't notice anything because he was “thinking about time.”

We took the highway out of the mountains, heading east. Every so often a semi passed me, honking alarmingly. I only connected this to the lack of rear lights when
we got to the hotel in Villahermosa and I went to check the car. “What kind of idiot are you?” I asked El Tomate. I didn't notice the theft either, but at least I had been busy listening to the Mayan legend. Why would the Japanese want marine phosphorescence? Is it nutritious? I thought about how easy it is to trick someone like me. Strangely, I thought better of El Tomate. He looked at me with disarming sadness. “Can I tell you something?” he asked.

He didn't wait for my answer to tell me that before we left Mexico City, he had burned off the warts on his chest. “I felt so old with those warts.” He lifted up his shirt to show me his burns, like some Xipe Totec, the Aztec Flayed God. Obviously he had scorched himself for the benefit of Karla.

The other news was that the iguana had vanished in the Ithsmus. We took the suitcases and Karla's water bottles out of the car, but there was no sign of it.

In Villahermosa, we stayed in a couple of bungalows with terraces. Every so often, a waiter would come by to offer us a drink. Karla went to bed early because she was exhausted from sleeping through the highway's winding curves.

El Tomate and I smoked a couple of dry cigars we had bought from a man selling paper flowers. We drank rum until very late. We had reached that friendly lethargy in which it's acceptable to not say anything at all. We could hear crickets, night birds, and, very far off, the satisfying sound of insects frying themselves on an electric lantern. El Tomate broke the peace: “Why don't you go get her?”

I thought he was talking about the iguana, but his eyes were fixed on Karla's bungalow. He scratched his bare chest. I stared at the ruddy stains. “They put liquid nitrogen on me,” he explained, like a futuristic martyr. He had burned himself to impress Karla, his warts had smoldered in a sacrificial rite, but now he was asking me to go after her. “It's obvious she likes you. She hasn't moved a single chair in two days,” his words came out bitterly, like the last mouthful of bad tobacco.

It had always been depressing to imagine my friend in his apartment next to the traffic off the Viaduct, writing about Roman churches and Sicilian ruins. Now there was nothing sadder than seeing him on this trip, devastatingly real.

“We already know which side the iguana chews on,” he added with a resigned smile.

When I got back to the room, something shifted inside me. The poverty of the scene—the tiny Rosa Venus soap, the rusty bottle opener, the ashtray bearing the name of some other hotel—made me realize that I was also in a bad state. It upset me that El Tomate would encourage me to approach Karla. I remembered the time he was carrying around the sound equipment for the band Aztlán. He took advantage of his privileged access to that music (flutes played in outrage over squalor) to sleep with Sonia. Now he was offering me a different woman to make up for his disloyalty. Or maybe he was playing another hand, maybe he needed to take advantage of the trip, to secure the possibility of complaining about me in the future. If I slept with Karla, his subsequent blackmail could be implacable, a rarefied cruelty, like the mood of a Mayan god.

He was right about one thing: Karla had stopped moving the furniture around, and not just that: at every restaurant she opened the packets of saltines, spread butter on them, and passed them to me without asking.

I washed myself in the dribble of water that fell from the showerhead. It was the prelude to a disastrous journey. We visited the ruins of Palenque. The guide wanted us to see the carving of an “astronaut” in the inner chamber of a pyramid. The “controls” of the “ship” were ears of corn.

“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.