by Yuri Herrera
“You ought to know,” she continued, and held out a piece of paper on which were scribbled large, unsteady letters.
“Your girls no good to you now shes nokt up ask the singer,” the note said. The Artist couldn’t help but be touched when he saw the penmanship: he’d been the one to teach the Girl to trace letters and now he wondered why she would lie. Only afterward, all at once, was he struck by the possibility that it was true, and then he got vertigo. The note trembled in his hands. The Witch took it and stroked the Artist’s face.
“It’s okay, just keep this quiet and we’ll take care of it.”
She gazed at him with a tenderness he recognized but couldn’t place, then turned and walked out.
He ran to the Girl’s room simply to confirm that the only traces of her were a couple of left-behind dresses. Then, frantic, he set out once more through the Palace in search of the Commoner, his urgency increasing with each empty room. Not only did he know what the Witch was capable of, he also felt the need to prevent anything more from happening.
He found her in the games room. She was playing solitaire at a card table, and when he walked in she hardly even glanced up, absent.
“Is it true?” he asked.
She seemed to startle and wrinkled her forehead. What?
Of course not. No. It couldn’t be true. Or at least the Girl couldn’t have known. But the seed was already planted and the solution began to take shape. He pulled the Commoner gently up by the arm. Without much conviction, she tried to shake him off.
“What’s wrong? What do you want?”
“Nothing,” the Artist replied. “Just let me show you someplace.”
The Artist led her from the Palace and she put up no fight nor showed any enthusiasm. He took her to a hotel far from the street, by the bridge, and told her he’d be back for her tomorrow, to wait for him. On his way out, a smell on the street made him recall which kind of tenderness the Witch had shown: he’d seen the way people pet lambs before a sacrifice.
When, the next day, he was told that the King was waiting in the library, the Artist got an inkling: he was about to be let in on a secret; electrified, he intuited that the relationship between them had entered new territory, a tighter place, where they shared a more complete view of the world that allowed mirrors like the one the Artist had constructed to be exchanged.
“He’s already been told about your latest song,” said the Manager, but the Artist was unable to read his face and see if he’d liked it or not. He now got an inkling, intuited a reprimand from the King, but then dismissed it, because once he told him what he’d seen at the party it would prove he was still on his side. The Artist even brought his accordion along so that afterward he could play him the song already circulating throughout the slums, in person.
The King was bent over the wooden table, palms on several outspread papers. He appeared not to be reading any of them, looked at them as tho searching for something specific, or measuring them. It seemed to the Artist as if his arms were the only still-strong thing about the King, as if the rest of his body were sinking into the floor with the force of its own gravity. The Artist upsidedown read one of the papers’ headlines. “The Net Tightens”, it said, with a photo of the King.
He had to tell him about the party, and wanted to sing him his song, but before he articulated anything at all the King lifted his gaze and said:
“So I’m a no-account fool? That’s what you say? That I can’t…”
He fell silent. The unfinished sentence and the fact that for the first time he’d addressed him not as usted but as tú suggested, yes, that there was some new bond between them, but not the one the Artist had hoped for.
“To get where I am, it’s not enough to be a badass, right. You have to be one and you have to look like one. And I am, fuck knows I am,” he paused, the Artist felt the King’s voice teeter between wracking sob and fit of rage, “but I need my people to believe it, and that, you little shit, is your job. Not running around claiming that I…”
His body shook as tho every bone were dying to hightail it out of there.
“Señor, I thought…”
“Where the fuck did you get the idea that you could think? Where? You’re a piece of fluff, a fucking music box, a thing that gets smashed, you piece of shit.”
He took two steps toward the Artist, snatched his accordion, hurled it against one of the empty bookshelves and then kicked until keys and springs were scattered all over the room. His back to the Artist, fists clenched, he said:
“Still, it’s my fault; that’s what I get for playing with strays that bite.”
The Artist knew that, following this, the King would turn and shred him, and knew that he would have the guts neither to make a stand nor to flee.
The Manager appeared all at once, almost between them, and announced:
“Señor, they’re here.”
The King glanced at the door to the boardroom, where a handful of green uniforms with yellow stars were taking a seat; he inhaled deeply, smoothed his hair gracelessly and walked to the room with the most timid steps the Artist had seen him take. The enemy, one of the enemies, was there, on his turf, and Señor was in anguish as if those men were of his ilk, or as if they were the ones in charge. The Manager closed the door behind him. The Artist heard the scraping of chairs and of the King, repeating: General, General, and then saying:
“We’ll find a way around this, you’ll see.”
And then, nothing; but it was a condensed kind of nothing, one with texture, a nothing in which the Artist discerned an unsatisfied pause from the King, as if he couldn’t carry on until he’d settled. He heard him call one of his guards, heard the guard’s steps approach the head of the rectangular table and then sensed an even more informative nothing. In the time between the guard’s final step and his Yessir, there was just enough time for the King to condemn him. Go jack the fucker up, he said to his soldier. That was what that nothing sounded like. Maybe the Artist could guess his words or maybe it was nothing but a surge of adrenalin that set his intuition on edge, but he lifted his feet from the floor and was off like a shot the instant the door handle began to turn, headed who knew where, with a determination he didn’t know he had.
He bolted down hallways and through rooms that passed swiftly before his eyes because the Artist could hear the footsteps, clack, clack, clack of the goon behind him and urged his legs on with no sense of direction, or with some unfathomable compass that led him without warning to a blindspot. The balcony. The balcony and what lay beyond: the abyss of the desert. Or: the room that was not to be entered. Clack, clack, clack, clack comes the goon. He gripped the handle knowing that there was no hope, but the handle turned. He entered the room, stood at the center, stared at walls covered with paintings of women whose eyes seemed to follow whoever looked their way; all of them, the nude, the seated, the reclining, and those standing stiff. The Artist had seen the King enter and not exit before, knew there had to be a passageway. He quickly scanned the room and found, behind a full-length portrait, a crack, a vertical black line. Someone must have slipped out for a second and left the room unlocked. Clack, clack, clack, he heard the soldier almost outside. The Artist moved the painting: there really was a door. He slipped through and shut it behind himself, black-tar darkness flooding the space. Feeling along the walls he discovered he was in a tunnel, his stumbling feet told him he was descending short, broad steps. As he advanced, a tenuous orange glow began to light his way. The glow became a glare and the Artist arrived in another room in which he found candles in every corner, an altar, necklaces of maguey thorns, crowns of peyote, blue feathers with bloody tips, a portrait of the Holy Bandit, stones on the floor in the outline of a man, earthenware jugs overflowing with water. He slowly raised his hands, as tho afraid to shatter the image. Then he heard footsteps descending, but not the boots of his pursuer, these steps were lighter and not as swift.
And there appeared the W
itch. She stopped at the end of the room with a candle in each hand. Then, staring at the Artist all the while, acknowledging him all the while, she stepped up to the altar.
“Have you seen my daughter?” she asked.
“She’s gone.”
“Is she pregnant?”
The Artist shook his head. The Witch lowered her gaze, pensive; she seemed first disappointed, then simply resigned. She placed the candles on the altar, scanning it carefully, and then looked around as tho she’d lost something.
“Who would have thought such a sorry-ass stray could fuck everything up so royally. Fine mess you made. Not only do you not help me with the baby but you tell the whole world he’ll never have a child. That was all it took for them to eat him alive.” And then, as if speaking to herself, she added, “If only you hadn’t let my daughter get away, that other bastard might’ve been interested, now that he can stop pretending he’s not a threat and think about his own lineage.”
Suddenly the Witch lost the thread that had been holding her together: the Artist glimpsed her endless exhaustion, a fatigue he’d have thought impossible. Sadly, she asked:
“Do you know where she went?”
“No.”
“Well, good luck to her, maybe she’ll find an easier path.” She straightened her shoulders, pulled herself together and said, “But the rest of us have still got to live here.”
She left. Moments later, the Artist followed. He stepped quietly, crouched on reaching the exit tho it wasn’t necessary: the Palace was deserted. Magnificent and glacial as a royal tomb. He decided to escape through a back garden, but when he was on his way out bumped smack into the Jeweler, who held a curved-blade dagger in one hand, identical, of course, to that of the first murder. Blood dripped onto the white marble.
“It was no use,” the Jeweler said through his tears, “no one helped him. Now what are we going to do?”
The Artist wished that the man was not carrying a knife, not because he thought the Jeweler might hurt him but because he held it as tho it were all he had left. The Artist sensed that if he attempted to help, he’d end up in the same state. He stepped cautiously to the side to pass the knife-wielding ghost of a man and went out to the grounds.
Tho he almost tripped over the body, he hardly registered the lifeless peacock, its throat slit, as he left.
It was because he now sensed he had all the time in the world that he didn’t hurl his anxieties onto the Commoner, but also because since arriving at the hotel he’d been lost, for hours, in the contemplation of the new splendor she possessed. She said nothing, the Commoner, just smiled with newborn serenity, and her body, her entire body, breathed pure, from within an aura that the Artist was afraid to defile. Like a blossom, a thing different from whatever it was he was, generating her own energy, lifeblood. Amazing, he thought; women are something else, and all you have to do is get over yourself to see how they shine.
A miracle, he felt, that a woman like her could be contemplated for hours and hours by someone like him. That was what was called a miracle. Miracle, he murmured, and was tormented by the sense that something was wrong, a chorus repeating: what gave him the right, he was taking something that wasn’t his, something intended for the one who’d helped him. The notion almost broke him for a moment but then something exploded inside and brought to his lips the word No: No, he cannot rule my life. No, I will not let them tell me what to do. It was a truth he knew already, deep down, though he’d been unable to name it. The revelation made him drop to the bed. He sat there quite some time, feeling the space around him expand, and feeling with each heartbeat how the Commoner could fill it.
In the middle of the night the Artist crept out of the room. He walked to the cantina where he’d first met the King, a port like any other: lots of people passing through and a handful of faithful standbys to keep it afloat. Always the walls were dripping with dark sweat, cigarette butts lost in the sawdust like grass. The only things that looked new were the streamers, at night there were always paper streamers, and music all day, except during the brief torpor that fell when the sun was vertical. Between songs he took in the banter of the B girls and admired the customers, who could be told apart from the simple drunks by their civility: May I? And he heard the fortunes and tragedies of the average jack:
The wetback who’d been deported by immigration and was unwanted on this side as well. They’d told him to sing the anthem, explain what a molcajete was and recite the ingredients of pipián to see if he was really allowed to stay; his jitters made him forget it all so they kicked him out too. The narco-in-training who sent bindles of smack over the river with a slingshot and then simply crossed over to pick them up, until one day he got a wild hair and hit a gringo in the head with his whiterock crackshot, and tho that was the end of his business, he still got a kick out of calling himself an avenger. The woman who, to free herself of her cheating husband, sold the house to a much-feared loanshark and left hubby with no house, no wife, and no peace. The boy who faked his own kidnapping to wheedle money from his parents, who believed the ransom note was real and replied, You know what? We’re tired of that bum, how about bumping him off for half the price? And the boy, out of utter sorrow, said Okay, collected the cash, spent it on booze and then kept his word.
Who was the King? An allpowerful. A ray of light who had lit up the margins because it couldn’t be any other way as long as it wasn’t revealed what he was. A sad sack, a man betrayed. A single drop in the sea of men with stories. A man with no power over the terse fabric inside the artist’s head. (The Artist allowed himself to feel the power of an order different from that of the Court, the skill with which he detached words from things and created his own sovereign texture and volume. A separate reality.)
To say homeboy, daydream, decanter, meadowland, rhythm. To say anything.
To listen to the sum of every silence.
To give a name to the space full of promise.
And then to fall silent.
It was all a matter of adding one plus one, stacking one stone on top of another to answer all the questions. He could have done it, and explained the whole thing to everyone, but this seemed so tedious, and he realized that he had absolutely no interest in exposing the intrigue—simply a series of incidentals exemplifying a system he now saw through.
That was what the Artist thought as he looked at a newspaper, one brought in by a new arrival who’d come at first light: there were two photos on the front page: in one, the Witch’s body, peppered with countless bullet holes, dumped in with the Traitor’s body, a shot to the back of the head. In the other, the King surrounded by five self-satisfied soldiers. It shook him to know the private realities behind the pictures. The vehemence that the Witch’s inert body could never again express. The hidden imbroglios behind the fallen man. And there was something strange in the King’s face, strange because it was out of place: he radiated satisfaction, the vanity of untouched grandeur. How did he do it? The Artist read in the caption at the bottom of the photo that the King had been captured during “an intimate encounter” with three women. Right, he thought. There’s a story to be sung, not the role the King had played with grace until the end, but the other tale, the one about masks, and egotism, and misery. And then he said to himself: A story for someone else to sing. Why should he refute the paper’s cock and bull? At this stage he preferred the truth over the true story.
A sudden silence at the Port made him scan the tables and couples to discover what was going on. What he saw at the entrance startled him not because it was a surprise but precisely because it was so logical: it had to happen, and it hadn’t occurred to him. Here came the Manager, flanked by two guards. The elegance of the former and stiffness of the latter were not only out of place in the cantina but asserted a supremacy that the crowd sensed in an instant. The Artist decided to let them come up and kill him and, more than fear, felt sadness at no longer being able to undertake
all the things that in the past few hours he had glimpsed. The Manager stopped in front of him, looked over at the band and ordered: Keep playing. Gently he pushed the Artist by the forearm to one end of the bar.
“Why so far from your friends, Artist?”
“These are my friends.”
With scorn the Manager eyed the couples and musicians the Artist had motioned toward.
“Cut the shit.” He pointed to the Traitor’s photo in the paper. “That happened to him cause he was a spent cartridge, but you’re still useful. Señor wants you to come work for him.”
“Señor…? Who…?”
“Who do you think? The man it was always meant to be.”
The Artist considered it for a second and realized immediately that even if he accepted, he could never write anything to sing the Heir’s praises; he seemed a man whose soul was too puckered, and the Artist no longer had eyes for people like that. If this was it, if this was his last song, so be it, at least he’d figured out a few things out before it was all over.
“I hope you’ll forgive me, Manager, but I can’t give what I haven’t got. I’m no good for what your Señor wants, so if there’s nothing else, I think I’ll go my own way.”
The Manager’s eyes bored into him, searching for sincerity. Then he turned back to look at the Port, made a face like he wanted to spit, and he spat. It was what everyone did, but the Manager’s spit had airs.
“Fine,” he said then. “Your loss. Because God knows things are going to run smooth now that we’re all on the same side.”
He gazed at the Artist one last time, hoping, perhaps, that he’d change his mind, and then headed for the door. Before walking out, he said something to one of the guards. The guard came back to the bar, opened his jacket with one hand and let the Artist see the piece between his belly and his belt; but rather than reach for it, his hand dipped into a pocket, pulled out a bill and slipped it to the Artist.
