Free The Guilty by Juan Villoro Page A

body. Then they ate the heart. The guide smiled with his fishy teeth.
    I felt a hole in my stomach. Karla painstakingly bit her nails. I bought green mangos but she didn’t want to try them. We saw the delicate skulls of the Tzompantli, the stone writing of those legible buildings in a language that had been lost. I thought about the bleeding iguana that fed the Mayan pilgrims. A sensation of loss, of diffuse horror came over me. The iguana followed us, our unlikely pet. I remembered how much I owed El Tomate. In his way, he wanted to do me a favor by disappearing at dawn like the Lone Ranger. Karla looked at the sky to avoid seeing the iguana. “The guides lie,” I told her. “They’re blind fish.” She didn’t ask me to explain. She must have been thinking something terrible; her body shook, stuck in a shudder. Maybe it wasn’t the Mayan cruelty that shocked her so much as the effect of the story, the way in which it intersected our journey. El Tomate had sold me to her as an attractive problem he couldn’t fully fathom, or one which had already exceeded him.She lifted my hand off her shoulder. “I have to think,” she said, as if ideas came to her through touch.
    By the time we got to the cenote, it was getting dark. The iguana changed course when it saw four or five members of its own species on the wet earth surrounding the pool. There, it left us.
    The Chevy was waiting in the parking lot. I thought about the things that are destroyed so that poetry can exist. I thought about Yeats and the impossible, sacrificial love of Celts. I thought about my inability to sink deep like the dusk.
    Karla wanted to sit in the back seat. I asked her to sit next to me. This time she did not cite The System of Objects. “It’s the seat of death,” she said. “I’m not your chauffeur,” I answered sharply. Scared, she obeyed.
    We crashed three curves outside of Chichén Itzá. The brakes didn’t respond. The cables had been gnawed straight through. Karla broke two ribs, puncturing her lung. The Chevy was totaled. I was unhurt except for the bite I already had on my hand.
    Sometimes I think Karla stopped talking to me because I was unharmed, and that gave intentionality to the accident. Too many times she said, “It wasn’t your fault.” Everything had been wrong from before we’d entered the car, or from a moment before that, already irrecoverable. What design were we fulfilling when we shared our breath and believed we could search for ourselves in two bodies?
    I tried in vain to write “The Green Circle.” Over long afternoons, the only thing I did was sketch an animal.
    El Tomate published his report with stupendous photos of Oaxaca and Yucatán. When I read it, I remembered the nape of Karla’s neck, the skin on her back glowing in that light that only exists on the peninsula.
    That night, I saw her in my dreams. I asked her what the iguana’s name was, but I didn’t dream her answer.

ORDER SUSPENDED

    For Manuel Felguérez
    Rosalía has more than enough to worry about. She lights a candle for the Russians trapped in their submarine (they were communicating by banging a metal door with their tools, they didn’t have much oxygen left, and the sea was freezing). She’s like that. She prays for Russians she doesn’t know, who won’t be saved.
    I hate spots. I huffed too much glue in high school and one night I understood that the spots on my arms were spiders embedded in my skin. I tried to cut them out with a knife. My father kicked me in the face and saved me. He also broke my jaw. They wired it shut and I spent weeks drinking soup through a straw. Quitting glue isn’t easy. You wake up and your fingernails are full of plaster dust from scratching the walls all night. “Only pain makes you feel better,” my father told me.It’s true. His kick put me on a new path. I didn’t go back to