The Guilty by Juan Villoro Page A

that ticket, but he toldme with a droll smile,“I remember.” His smile irritated me because it was the same one he had when confessing he’d slept with Sonia, the Chilean refugee I’d chased around without the slightest possibility of getting into her poncho.
    That reconciliation at Monte Albán was enough for us to stop seeing each other. We had crossed an invisible line.
    For two years after that, we barely spoke. I didn’t even call him when I found the Aztlán LP he had loaned me thirty years before. Once in a while, at the barbershop or at the dentist’s office, I would find a copy of the magazine where he wrote about islands he would never see.
    El Tomate got back in touch when I won the Texcoco Floral Games with a poem that I thought was pre-Ra-phaelite, heavily influenced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The prize was awarded as part of the Pulque Festival. El Tomate called at seven in the morning on the day the winner was announced. “I want to carve a carpel from the epos,” he exclaimed joyfully. Which meant that he wanted to go with me to the award ceremony, possibly to call in the favor of having gotten me into the questionable Silvio Rodríguez concert. I didn’t respond. What he said next offended me. “López Velarde. Didn’t you recognize the quote, poet?”
    I said I would call him to set things up, but I never did. I imagined him in Texcoco too perfectly: gray hairs visible on the underside of his mustache, drinking a sour-smelling pulque, and declaring that my poems were terrible.
    His most recent call involved the Chevy. I had filled out a form at a Superama grocery store and won a car. I was in the paper, an expression of primitive happiness on my face as I accepted a set of keys that seemed to have been fashioned for the occasion (the keychain gave off a luxurious sparkle). El Tomate asked me to take him from Oaxaca to Yucatán. He had to write an article. He was sick of imagining life in five star hotels and writing about dishes he would never taste. He wanted to plunge into reality. “Like before,” he added, inventing for us some shared past as anthropologists or war correspondents.
    Then he said, “Karla will come with us.” I asked him who she was and he became evasive. I was still recovering from the photo of me holding the car keys appearing in the paper and suddenly wanted to do things that might annoy me. Also, something had happened that I needed to get away from. A lot of time has passed but I still can’t talk about it without getting embarrassed. I’d slept with Gloria López, who was married, and there had been an accident unlike anything either of us had ever experienced before. An improbable occurrence, like some spontaneous combustion that burns a body or a film negative to ashes. My condom disappeared inside her vagina. “An abduction,” she said, more intrigued than worried. Gloria believes in extraterrestrials. She was reasonably interested in me for the occasional roll in the hay, but she was enormously interested in a contact of the “third kind,” for which I had been a mere intermediary.
    How can indestructible rubber just disappear? She was sure that it had something to do with aliens. Could she get pregnant, or would the condom be encapsulated?That verb reminded me of her favorite movie, Fantastic Voyage, with Raquel Welch. Gloria was too young to have seen it when it first came out. An ex-boyfriend who dedicated himself to pirating videos had awakened her to a fantasy which seemed to have been created just for her. A ship’s crew is reduced to microscopic size and injected into a body to perform a complex medical operation. The body as a variant of the cosmos could only excite someone who lived to be abducted and pulled into other dimensions. “What would the internauts feel like inside of you?” Gloria asked with the seriousness of someone who considers such a thing to be