The Guilty by Juan Villoro

me. My character took on the defects of a perfect son of a bitch. To Jorge, it would have been realistic for me to act like the weak man I really was, but he couldn’t credit me with such magnificent villainy. The next day, The Body Count was ready. It had no ñ’s, but it was ready.
    â€œYou can always count on an ex-alcoholic to satisfy a vice,” he told me. I didn’t know if he was referring to his vice of turning guilt into film or satisfying the jealousy of others.
    With the chicken shears, Jorge made some cuts to the screenplay. The most significant was my name. He made money with The Body Count, but it was a bland success. No one heard Chaplin’s whistle.
    As for me, something kept me in front of the typewriter, perhaps a line of my brother’s from his last night on the farm:
    â€œThe scar is on the other ankle.”
    I had slept with Lucía, but I didn’t remember the site of her scar. Making things up was my refuge. Was that the vice Jorge had referred to? I would keep writing. That night, I limited myself to saying,
    â€œI’m sorry, forgive me.”
    I don’t know if I cried. My face was wet with sweat, or tears I didn’t feel. My eyes hurt. The night opened up before us, like when we were boys and we’d climb onto the roof to make wishes. A light streaked the sky.
    â€œAugust 12th,”Jorge said.
    We spent the rest of the night watching shooting stars, like bodies lost in the desert.

MAYAN DUSK

    It was the iguana’s fault. We stopped in the desert next to one of those men who spend their whole lives squatting, holding three iguanas by the tail. The man we called El Tomate, “the Tomato,” inspected the merchandise as if he knew something about green animals.
    The peddler, with a face carved by sun and drought, told us that iguana blood restored sexual energy. He didn’t tell us how to feed the animal because he thought we would eat it right away.
    El Tomate works for a travel magazine. He lives in a ghastly building that looks out on the Viaduct. From there, he describes the beaches of Polynesia.
    This time, as an exception, he really was visiting the places he would write about, Oaxaca and Yucatán. Four years earlier, we had made the trip in the oppositedirection, Yucatán-Oaxaca. Back then we were so inseparable that if people saw me without him, they would ask, “Where’s El Tomate?”
    We finished that last trip at the ruins of Monte Albán during a solar eclipse. The golden stones lost their glow and the valley was cast in a weak light that didn’t belong to any time of day. The birds sang out in bewilderment and tourists took each other by the hand. I felt a strange urge to repent, and confessed to El Tomate that I had been the one who pushed him into the cenote at Chichén Itzá.
    That had happened a few days earlier. After seeing the sacred water, my friend couldn’t stop talking about human sacrifices. The Mayans, superstitious about small things, threw their midgets, their toys, their jewels, their favorite children, all into the sacred water. I walked up to a group of deaf-mute visitors. A woman was translating the guide’s information into sign language: “He who drinks from the cenote will return to Chichén Itzá.” We were at the water’s edge, and El Tomate was leaning over it. Something made me push him in. The rest of the trip was an ordeal because the water gave him salmonella. At Monte Albán, in the indeterminate light of the eclipse, I felt bad and asked for his forgiveness. He took this as an opportunity to ask me, “Do you really not remember that I got you into the Silvio Rodríguez concert?” At the beginning of our friendship, in the early seventies, El Tomate had been the sound tech for the Mexican folk group Aztlán. His moment of glory arrived with his involvement in a festival of New Cuban Trova. Honestly I didn’t remember him getting me