Free The Guilty by Juan Villoro Page B

school, where the teacher had told us, “Study, boys, or you’ll end up being journalists.” I wanted to sink down into journalism. Instead, I rose up on a scaffold as a window cleaner.
    In front of the building, Jacinto sours life with his lottery tickets. He fell off a scaffold centuries ago. Now he’s a gimp promising good fortune. I’ve seen blind men, crippled men, hunchbacked men selling lottery tickets— like they were fucked over so you could win. None of them ever buys a ticket.
    The building is intelligent. The lights go on when you walk down a hallway; in the elevator, a voice says the names of the floors and the companies that occupy them. The voice is sexy and cold. A soldier woman. “The building sees more signs than you do,” Rosalía complains. She thinks I’m insensitive: “You’re fuckin’ deprived.” I’m too deprived to see the things that interest her, but I did notice that the elevator voice talks just like a warrior woman I saw on TV. The Japanese listened to her, closed their eyes, and took delight in dying.
    â€œYou don’t see signs,” she insists.
    â€œSigns of what?” I ask.
    â€œSigns of anything.”
    Rosalía smells like something ocean-y, foamy. The sheet rises over her nose when she sleeps. I’ve been collecting 20 peso bills for years. I stick them in a plastic Spiderman doll I won in a raffle. It came full of powdered hot chocolate. The doll reminds Rosalía that one afternoon I had good aim. I think about the blue bills inside it, a tight sea, held in place.
    * * *
    I don’t like the city from the scaffold but I like that it’s behind me. A vibrating mass. Every scaffold has two operators. I go up and down with a guy we call El Chivo, the Goat. El Chivo smokes all day. He smokes because inside the building there’s no smoking and because the cigarettes are called Wings.
    El Chivo is a veteran. The first day he explained what he calls “the method:” You shouldn’t look down or to the side; what you should watch is your own face in the glass. That’s what you’re cleaning, your reflection.
    It’s almost impossible to see through the glass because of the reflective coating. Sometimes I look and look and I see something inside. That’s how I spotted the painter in the meeting room on Floor 18. He was standing in front of a huge white canvas. I saw him put the first spot on it. I hate spots, as I said before, but I couldn’t stop staring at the black paint beginning to drip. I felt strange, like those spots were the sins I carried inside me. I wanted to clean them like I wanted to get the spiders out from under my skin. Then the painter started to use other colors. All earth tones, but very different. How many colors make up the Earth? I calmed myself by staring at a spot that was rusted. Like mud made from rotted metal toys. I looked so hard I thought a blood spot might appear in the white of my eye, like the one Rosalía has. It’s a mole. Sometimes she says it appeared on its own, other times she says a piece of charcoal fell into her eye when she was a girl. I think she saw something she’s not telling me about. That’s why she looks at things like they’re signs.
    â€œIt’s abstract,” El Chivo said, as if he could see better from his part of the scaffold. “Do you know what abstract is?”
    I didn’t answer him. I know I don’t see signs. That’s what abstract is.
    â€œDon’t you think it’s nuts that spots get a name? One spot isn’t called anything, but a bunch of spots get a title.” He pointed to the painting through the glass.
    El Chivo never stops talking, like his tongue is full of spines he can’t quite spit out.
    â€œTogether the spots mean more than just spots.”
    â€œSpot on!” I said.
    He kept talking. He needs so many words to tell a story that’s always the same: