The Guilty by Juan Villoro Page B

possible. “Is there anything kinkier than having internauts in your veins ?” The movie’s producers were thinking the same thing when they chose Rachel Welch and dressed her in an extremely tight white suit. The sexual nonsense of a tiny turgid body advancing through your blood seduced Gloria, who now felt crewed by the condom that had ended up inside her. It didn’t help to recall that the original seamen exited the body through a tear duct, a metaphor announcing that all adventures of intravenous seduction end in tears. On top of all this was the possibility that Gloria’s husband would find this improbable intruder by the way of all flesh (Alluding to Samuel Butler doesn’t diminish the grotesqueness of the topic, I know, but at least it’s too highbrow for El Tomate’s taste).
    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 myaccomplice 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