The Guilty by Juan Villoro

magnificent nightmares. Sometimes I wonder what I’d have to lose by telling her once and for all that I couldn’t care less about syncretism and the only collage I’m interested in is her. But then I remember she likes to take care of people. She thinks of herself as a nurse. Maybe the scripts are the therapy she’s assigned to me and all she wants is for me to take my medicine. But the good monster thing sounds racy, almost pornographic. Although it would be more pornographic if she congratulated me on being the bad monster. The soul of a woman is a complicated thing.
    Yes, I disconnected the answering machine to erase any record of the voice that obsessed me. When the phone rang twenty times, I couldn’t help wondering what kind of psychopath was trying to get hold of me. That’s how I ended up talking to Katzenberg again.
    He was still on the line. He had run out of polite phrases and was waiting for my response.
    I looked in my wallet: two green 200-peso notes, with traces of cocaine (not enough). The sight alone convinced me, but Katzenberg still made an emotional appeal:
    â€œThis isn’t the first time they’ve asked me to come back to Mexico. Believe it or not, the Frida story was a hit. I didn’t want to come back, and a colleague, an anti-Semitic Irishman who was trying to fuck my girlfriend, spread the rumor that I didn’t want to come back because I’d done something dirty. It wouldn’t be the first time a gringo reporter got into trouble with the narcotraffickers or the DEA.”
    â€œYou came back to clear your name?” I asked.
    â€œYes,” he answered, humbly.
    I told him I was not “one of the locals.” If he wanted to refer to me, he’d have to use my name. It was a question of principles and the proper attribution of sources. Then I asked him for three thousand dollars.
    There was a silence on the other end of the line. I thought Katzenberg was doing calculations, but he had already moved on to the subject of his story.
    â€œHow violent is Mexico City, really?”
    I remembered something Burroughs wrote to Kerouac or Ginsberg or some other big-time addict who wanted to come to Mexico but was scared he’d get jumped.
    â€œDon’t worry: Mexicans only kill their friends.”
    3. Keiko
    Those days, the only interesting thing in Mexico City was Keiko’s farewell. On Sundays, divorced fathers depend heavily on zoos and aquariums. I got in the habit of taking Tania to Adventure Kingdom, the theme park that we thought of as a whale sanctuary.
    I decided to spend the morning with Tania, watching the whale swim in powerful circles (my daughter, more accurately, referred to it as an “orca”) and in the afternoon I’d look for attractive, violent settings with Katzenberg. That wouldn’t be easy. All the spots I’ve been mugged are too ordinary.
    One thing was still unresolved: when would I write that first draft for Cristi?
    While I tried to salvage some cocaine dust from a bill with Sor Juana’s face on it, I came up with an ontolog-ical excuse for my block. What was the point of writing scripts in a country where the Cineteca Theaters exploded while they were showing The Promised Land? I remembered the problem we’d had with an extra who got beat up in a scene, and my script had him say “Aggh!” The union decided that since the victim had a speaking part, he should be paid as an actor instead of an extra. After that, my victims died in silence.
    Anyway, I’ve never seen the slightest resemblance between what I imagine and the handsome stud or bottle blonde who garbles my words onscreen.
    â€œWhy don’t you write a novel?” Renata asked me once. We were still married then and she was still willing to change me for my own sake, starting with imagining me as a novelist. “In novels, special effects are free andthe characters aren’t unionized. All that counts is your