The Guilty by Juan Villoro

Author:Juan Villoro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: George Braziller Inc.

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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 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.

“You don’t see signs,” she insists.

“Signs of what?” I ask.

“Signs 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.

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