The Guilty (9 page)

I descended half asleep. The Chief Intendant was waiting for us. The news he had was splitting his face with happiness. He took us into the lobby. People eyed our harnesses with great respect. There was a feeling like something was about to happen. On one screen, a video was being projected. A gringo named Melvin was going to climb our building. He was training to climb the Kuala Lumpur Towers. Our building was the height of the “knee” of Kuala Lumpur. He would have to climb ours several times to be prepared. They
asked him why he didn't climb mountains and he said, “Buildings are more virgin.” Then we saw the sharp, golden towers, like sky-high pagodas that fed on light: “Kuala Lumpur.”

The Chief Intendant informed us that we would spend a week inside the building, clearing the terrain for the climber. They sent me to clean the meeting room; El Chivo was assigned the first floor.

The Chief knows Rosalía. I got the job because he's the
compadre
of someone in the neighborhood who admires Rosalía. The Chief doesn't admire me. “With any luck, he'll fall.” That's how he told her he was giving me the job.

They announced there would be a party for the employees. TV crews were coming to promote our building. Rosalía was going to participate, too. She works in a bakery and our night watchman recommended it. We were going to cut one cake shaped like the Kuala Lumpur Towers and another shaped like our building.

Rosalía had counted the days the Russians were in the submarine, until they asphyxiated at the bottom of the sea. She worries about far away things. You ask her how she's doing and you never know if she's answering for herself.

That week, Rosalía could only think about the climber, about how he might die for something meaningless. They are no Olympics for building climbing. Melvin was risking his life just because. Afterwards, everyone would forget about him like they had with the Russians in the submarine.

* * *

Rosalía made an enormous cake. We were going to eat cake simply because someone had dared to dangle above us. I liked seeing her so worked up, thinking about her cake and the moments when strangers sink with no hope, or climb very high with no explanation. Then I thought about our trip to the sea. A surprise isn't exactly a sign, but at least I would give her something unexpected.

What I liked most about working inside the building was looking at the tower across the street. Made out of glass. Almost invisible. Only the orange sparkle of the sun revealed where the glass stopped and the air began.

I wanted to light a cigarette but didn't dare. The painter, they let smoke. He puffed on cigar tobacco that he put in a pipe. He likes to turn one thing into another. His spots had turned into blocks. They looked like a map. A map without geography.

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 why 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.