Free The Guilty by Juan Villoro

Tizimín; among the pale stones ofthe immense atrium of Izamal; under the laurel trees in the Mérida’s main square. It wasn’t drawn to the greenery that surrounded the cenote at Dzibilchaltún either. It kept coming back to us, domesticated by our delicious flies, by the Chevy and its innumerable holes. “Animals hate authenticity,” I told El Tomate.
    That afternoon I called Gloria. “It finally came out,” she told me. I felt a cosmic relief. She, however, was not in a good mood. “Now I want to know which part of me my passport is going to come out of.” I knew that the only thing that tied us together were the problems I could cause her.
    When I hung up, I saw Karla in the distance, standing on a rock. Her silhouette had a strange immobility. Her body, agile and tense, didn’t seem to be at rest; she was gathering energy to jump.
    Near the archeological site of Chichén Itzá, we found a little hotel that was part of a Brahman cattle ranch. We had been driving the whole afternoon, facing into the sun. El Tomate had a tremendous migraine. He went to bed early and Karla said to me, “I thought of a name for the iguana.”
    I put my finger on her lips so she wouldn’t say “Odysseus” or “Xóchitl” or “Tao.” She kissed me softly. That night I caressed her yin-yang tattoo until morning.
    I went back to my room when dawn broke. I saw fragile trees with intricate fronds. A blue bird was singing in the branches. The white cattle were grazing on the flat land. I felt happy and guilty. By the time I got back to my room, I just felt guilty. I had pushed El Tomate into the water because I could never stand that Soniapreferred him to me; he’d had the decency to forgive me, and I had paid him back in false coin. To top it off, I had remembered that it was him who got me into that Silvio Rodríguez concert. El Tomate felt old. It had been years since he’d had a stable relationship, he had burned off his warts like a punitive Aztec. I thought about different ways to approach him. They were all unnecessary: he had slipped a note under the door. “I understand. I would have done the same thing. We’ll see each other in Mexico City.” That note situated him mysteriously beside us, as if he had been spying on us the whole night.
    I visited Chichén Itzá in a zombie state. Karla told me she knew I was in love with her when she caught me staring strangely while we ate buñuelos outside the Santo Domingo Convent in Oaxaca. The truth is, I was looking at her strangely because the iguana was insisting on biting me in the same place it had already bitten me.
    We climbed the 91 stairs of the Pyramid of Kukulcán; neither the heat nor the exertion impeded conversation. She told me she had left Cancún because she was sick of her suitors. Then she pointed at a gringo in a Hawaiian shirt who hadn’t stopped taking pictures of her. She felt harassed by the unfulfilled desires of others. Only El Tomate, who was old and a consummate gentleman, had treated her with egalitarian friendship.
    When we got to the cenote, I felt even worse. El Tomate had drunk the water, but the prophecy of returning was being fulfilled by me. Perhaps wrongful immersion brings about such consequences.
    In that moment, I hated archeological guides. They were like deep sea fish. They had swollen eyelids and talked about things they didn’t understand. There were so many, it was impossible not to hear what came out of their heads, so full of murky water. At the Tzompantli, the Place of Skulls, one of the guides said that the Mayans brought iguanas on their journeys. They skinned them alive because meat rots quickly in the heat of Yucatán. On the steps of the sacbé, the white road that joins the sacred cities, they would tear off chunks of meat and continue traveling. As long as the iguana’s heart kept beating, they could eat bits of its