The Guilty by Juan Villoro Read Free Book Online

sit face to face. Jorge imagined himself a screenwriter. He had a contact in Tucson, which isn’t exactly the Mecca of cinema, a gringo who was interested in a “raw story” that apparently we could tell. TheWindstar and a two-thousand-dollar advance were proof of his interest.
    The gringo believed in Mexican cinema as in a quintessential guacamole. There was too much hatred and passion at the border not to exploit it on-screen. In Arizona, farmers shot at migrants lost on their land (“a hot safari,” the man had said; Jorge made him sound like an evangelist). Then, the unlikely producer had mixed a red margarita. “Mexican essence,” he said, “rests among a pile of corpses.”
    The gringo’s greatest extravagance was trusting my brother. Jorge’s filmmaker training consisted of driving American drug addicts around the Oaxaca coasts. They told him about movies we had never seen in Sacramento. When he moved to Torreón, he would go to the video store every day just because it had air conditioning. They hired him to make his presence seem normal and because he could recommend movies he’d never seen.
    My brother came back to Sacramento with a strange look in his eyes. I was sure it had something to do with Lucía. She had been so bored out here, in this wasteland, that when Jorge returned she gave him a chance. Even back then, when he was still a reasonable weight and had all his teeth, my brother looked like a cosmic nutjob, like someone who’d been abducted by a UFO. Maybe he had the pedigree of a man who’s gone great distances; the point is Lucia let him into her house behind the gas station. It was hard to believe someone with Lucía’s body and her obsidian eyes couldn’t find a better candidate among the truckers who stoppedto pump diesel. Jorge took the luxury of leaving her, as well.
    He didn’t want to tie himself to Sacramento. But he wore it on his skin: he had shooting stars tattooed on his back, the “Tears of San Fortino” that fall each year on August 12th. It was an incredible spectacle we watched as children. Plus, his middle name is Fortino.
    My brother was made for leaving, but also for coming back. He arranged his most recent return by phone. He said our broken lives looked like those of other filmmakers. Latin artists were making it big. The man in Tucson believed in fresh talent. Curiously, the “raw story” was mine; that’s why I had a typewriter in front of me.
    I had also made it out of Sacramento. For years, I drove semis on both sides of the border. In the shifting landscapes of that period, my only constant was Tecate beer. I joined Alcoholics Anonymous after flipping a truck full of fertilizer in Los Vidrios. I was unconscious on the freeway for hours, breathing in tomato-enhancing chemical powder. Maybe that explains why I took a new job where the suffering seemed gratifying. For four years after that, I delivered I.V. bags to undocumented workers lost in the desert. I ran the routes from Agua Prieta to Douglas, from Sonoyta to Lukeville, from Nogales to Nogales (I rented a room in each of the Nogales, as if I were living in a city and its reflection). I met the polleros who smuggled people across the border, Immigration agents, members of the Paisano program. I never saw those who picked up the I.V. bags. The only undocumented people I ever found had already been detained. They were shivering under a blanket. Theylooked like Martians. Maybe the coyotes were the only ones who drank the liquid. The sum of all the corpses they find in the desert is called The Body Count. That’s the title Jorge picked for the movie.
    Loneliness makes you a babbler. After driving alone for ten hours, you gush words. “Being an ex-alcoholic means spinning tales,” someone told me in AA. One night, after the rates went down, I called my brother. I told him a story I couldn’t quite make sense of. I was driving