The King Is Always Above the People

by Daniel Alarcón

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “You know.”

  I drove slowly through downtown, and then under the Ninth Avenue Bridge, and into the vast anonymity of tract homes and dry gullies, of evenly spaced streetlights with nothing to illuminate. We had friends who lived around here, grown women who collected crystals and whose neighborhood so depressed them that they often got in the car just to find somewhere else to walk the dog. Still, beneath the development, it was beautiful country: after a half hour, the road smoothed out; another ten minutes and the lights vanished, and then you could really move. With the windows down and the hot air rushing in, you could pretend it was a nice place to live. A few motor homes tilting on cinder blocks, an abandoned shopping cart in a ditch, glittering in the headlights like a small silver cage—and then it was just desert, which is to say there was nothing at all but dust and red rock and an indigo sky speckled with stars. Hank had his hand on my knee, but I was looking straight ahead, to that point just beyond the reach of the headlights. With an odd job or two, we might be able to scrounge together rent. After that, it was anyone’s guess and the very thought was exhausting. I felt—incorrectly, it turns out—that I was too old to have nothing again.

  Lincoln and I spent a winter together in Chicago. He was on the city council and I worked at a deli. We couldn’t afford heat, and so every night we would curl our bodies together, beneath a half-dozen blankets, and hold tight, skin on skin, until the cold was banished. In the middle of the night, the heat between us would suddenly become so intense that either he or I or the both of us would throw the covers off. It happened every night, and every morning it was a surprise to wake, shivering, with the bedclothes rumpled on the floor.

  I’d made my way to southern Florida by the time he was killed. It had been eleven years since we’d been in touch. For the duration of the war I had wandered the country, looking for work. There was a white woman who had known my mother, and when I wrote to her, she offered me a place to stay in exchange for my labor. It seemed fine for a while. At dusk the cicadas made their plaintive music, and every morning we rose before dawn and cleared the undergrowth and dug canals in an endless attempt to drain the land. There were three men besides me, connected by an obscure system of relations stretching back into the region’s dim history: how it was settled and conquered, how its spoils had been divided. There was a lonely Cherokee and a Carib who barely spoke and a freed black who worked harder than the three of us together. The white woman had known all of our mothers, had watched us grow up and scatter and return. She intended to plant orange trees, just as she’d seen in a brochure once on a trip to Miami: trees in neat little rows, the dull beauty of progress.

  But this land was a knot, just a dense, spongy mangrove atop a bog. You could cup the dirt in your hands, squeeze it, and get water. “It’ll never work,” I said one afternoon, after a midday rain shower had undone in forty-five minutes what we had spent a week building. She fired me then and there, no discussion, no preamble. “Men should be more optimistic,” she said, and gave me a half hour to gather my things.

  It was the freed black who drove me to the bus station. When he had pulled the old truck out onto the road, he took his necklace from beneath his shirt. There was a tiny leather pouch tied to it.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s a bullet.” He turned very serious. “And there’s a gun hidden in the glade.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  He barely opened his mouth when he spoke. “That woman owned my mother, boy, and that land is going to be mine. Do you understand me now? Do you get why I work so hard?”

  I nodded, and suddenly felt a respect for him, for the implacability of his will, that was nearly overwhelming. When I had convinced him I understood, he turned on the radio, and that’s when we heard the news: Ford’s Theatre, the shooting, Sic semper tyrannis. The announcer faded in and out; and though I would miss my bus because of it, we found a place with good reception and, without having to say a word, both agreed to stop. The radio prattled breathlessly—the assassin had escaped—no, they had caught him—no, he had escaped. It was a wretched country we were living in, stinking, violent, diseased. I listened, not understanding, and didn’t notice for many minutes that my companion had shut his eyes and begun, very quietly, to weep. He closed his right fist around the bullet, and with the other gripped the steering wheel, as if to steady himself.

  I’ve been moving west since.

  That night we were fired, Hank and I made it to the highway, heading south, and then everything was easy. Along the way I forgot where we were going, and then remembered, and then forgot again. I decided it was better not to remember, that something would present itself, and so when the front right tire blew, it was like I’d been waiting for it all night. Hank had dozed, and now the truck shook violently, with a terrific noise, but somehow I negotiated it—me and the machine and the empty night highway—in that split second, a kind of ballet. Hank came to when we had eased onto the shoulder. I was shaking, but alive.

  “What did you do?” he asked, blinking. “Is this Mexico?”

  It seemed very real, what I felt: that truck had, through mechanical intuition, decided to blow a tire for me, to force me to stop. I turned on the cabin light. “How long has it been since you stopped loving me?”

  “Really?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “What month is this?” Hank said desperately.

  I didn’t budge.

  “Are you going to leave me here?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He smiled, as if this were a moment for smiling. “I’m not getting out. I paid for this truck.”

  “No you didn’t,” I said.

  “Still,” he shrugged, “I’m not getting out.”

  Which was fine. Which was perfect. There was a spare in the back, but it was flat too. If one must begin again late in life, better to do so cleanly, nakedly. I left the keys in the ignition. Out here, outside our small city, the air had cooled and I breathed it in. Life is very long. It had been years, but I recognized the feeling immediately. It wasn’t the first time I’d found myself on a dark highway, on foot, with nowhere to go.

  THE PROVINCIALS

  I’D BEEN OUT OF THE CONSERVATORY for about a year when my great-uncle Raúl died. We missed the funeral, but my father asked me to drive down the coast with him a few days later, to attend to some of the postmortem details. The house had to be closed up, signed over to a cousin. There were a few boxes to sift through as well, but no inheritance or anything like that.

  I was working at the copy shop in the Old City, trying out for various plays, but my life was such that it wasn’t hard to drop everything and go. Rocío wanted to come along, but I thought it’d be nice for me and my old man to travel together. We hadn’t done that in a while. We left the following morning, a Thursday. A few hours south of the capital, the painted slums thinned, and our conversation did too, and we took in the desolate landscape with appreciative silence. Everything was dry: the silt-covered road, the dirty white sand dunes, somehow even the ocean. Every few kilometers, there rose out of this moonscape a billboard for soda or beer or suntan lotion, its colors faded since the previous summer, its edges unglued and flapping in the wind. This was years ago, before the beaches were transformed into private residences for the wealthy, before the ocean was fenced off and the highway pushed back, away from the land’s edge. Back then, the coast survived in a state of neglect, and one might pass the occasional fishing village, or a filling station, or a rusting pyramid of oil drums stacked by the side of the road, a hitchhiker, perhaps a laborer, or a woman and her child strolling along the highway with no clear destination. But mostly you passed nothing at all. The monotonous landscape gave you a sense of peace, all the more because it came so soon after the city had ended.

  We stopped for lunch at a beach town four hours south of the capital, just a couple
dozen houses built on either side of the highway, with a single restaurant serving only fried fish and soda. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about the place, except that after lunch we happened upon the last act of a public feud: two local men, who might’ve been brothers or cousins or best of friends, stood outside the restaurant, hands balled in tight fists, shouting at each other in front of a tipped-over mototaxi. Its front wheel spun slowly, but did not stop. It refused to stop. It was like a perpetual motion machine. The passenger cage was covered with heavy orange plastic, and painted on the side was the word JOSELITO.

  And I wondered: Which of these two men is Joselito?

  The name could’ve fit either of them. The more aggressive of the pair was short and squat, his face rigid with fury. His reddish eyes had narrowed to tiny slits. He threw wild punches and wasted vast amounts of energy, moving like a spinning top around his antagonist. His rival, both taller and wider, started off with a look of bemused wonder, almost embarrassment, but the longer the little one kept at it, the more his expression darkened, so that within minutes, their moods were equally matched.

  Perhaps ownership of this name was precisely what they were arguing about, I thought. The wheel clicked at every rotation, and though I knew it was impossible, I was certain it was getting louder each time. The longer that front wheel kept spinning, the more disconcerted I became. The combatants danced around each other, now lunging, now retreating, both deeply committed to resolving the issue—whatever it might be—right then, right there.

  A boy of about eighteen stood next to my father and me. With crossed arms, he observed the proceedings as if it were a horse race on which he’d wagered a very small sum. He wore no shoes, and his feet were dusted with sand. Though it wasn’t particularly warm, he’d been swimming. I ventured a question.

  “Which one is Joselito?” I asked.

  He looked at me like I was crazy. He had a fuzzy blue name tattooed on his forearm, blurred and impossible to read. His girlfriend’s name? His mother’s?

  “Don’t you know?” he said in a low voice. “Joselito’s dead.”

  I nodded, as if I’d known, as if I’d been testing him, but by then the name of the dead man was buzzing around the gathered circle of spectators, whispered from one man to the next, to a child, then to his mother, so that it seemed, for a moment, that the entire town was humming it: “Joselito, Joselito.”

  A chanting; a conjuring.

  The two rivals continued, more furiously now. The mention of the dead man had animated them, or freed some brutal impulse within them. The smaller one landed a right hook to the bigger man’s jaw, and this man staggered, but did not fall. The crowd oohed and aahed, and it was only then that the two fighters realized they were being watched. I mean, they’d known it all along, of course; they must have. But when the crowd reached a certain mass, the whispering a certain volume, with all these many eyes fixed upon the arguing men—then everything changed. It could not have been more staged if they’d been fighting in an amphitheater, with an orchestra playing behind them. It was something I’d been working out myself, in my own craft: how the audience affects a performance, how differently we behave when we know we are being watched. True authenticity, I’d decided, required an absolute, nearly spiritual denial of the audience, or even of the possibility of being watched; but here, something true, something real, quickly morphed into something fake. It happened instantaneously, on a sandy street in this anonymous town: we were no longer accidental observers of an argument, but the primary reason for its existence. This awareness on the part of the protagonists served to alter and magnify their behavior, their gestures, and their expressions of anger. The scene was suddenly more dramatic, their taunts more carefully phrased, more pointed.

  “This is for Joselito!” the little man shouted.

  “No! This is for Joselito!” responded the other.

  And so on.

  The crowd cheered them both without prejudice. Or perhaps they were cheering the dead man. Whatever the case, soon blood was drawn, lips swollen, eyes blackened. And still the wheel spun. My father and I watched with rising anxiety—someone might die! Why won’t that wheel stop!—until, to our relief, a town elder rushed through the crowd and pushed the two men apart. He was frantic. He stood between them, arms spread like wings, a flat palm pressed to each man’s chest as they leaned steadily into him.

  This too was part of the act.

  “Joselito’s father,” said the barefoot young man. “Just in time.”

  “Naturally,” I said.

  We left and drove south for another hour before coming to a stretch of luxurious new asphalt, so smooth it felt like the car might be able to pilot itself. The tension washed away, and we were happy again, until we found ourselves trapped amid the thickening swarm of trucks headed to the border. We saw northbound traffic being inspected, drivers being shaken down, small-time smugglers dispossessed of their belongings. The soldiers were adolescent and smug, wishing, I assumed, that they’d been stationed somewhere more lucrative. Everyone paid. We would too when it was our turn to head back to the city. This was all new, my father said, and he gripped the wheel tightly and watched with mounting concern. Or was it anger? This corruption, the only kind of commerce that had thrived during the war, was also the only kind we could always count on. Why he found it so disconcerting, I couldn’t figure. Nothing could have been more ordinary.

  By nightfall we’d made it to my father’s hometown. My great-uncle’s old filling station stood at the top of the hill, under new ownership and doing brisk business now, though the truckers rarely ventured into the town proper. We eased the car onto the main street, a palm-lined boulevard that sloped down to the boardwalk, and left it a few blocks from the sea, walking until we reached the simple public square that overlooked the ocean. A larger palm tree, its trunk inscribed with the names and dates of young love, stood in the middle of this inelegant plaza. Every summer, the tree was optimistically engraved with new names and new dates, and then stood for the entire winter, untouched. I’d scratched a few names there myself, years before. On warm nights, when the town filled with families on vacation, the children brought out remote-control cars and guided these droning machines around the plaza, ramming them into one another or into the legs of adults, occasionally tipping them off the edge of the boardwalk and onto the beach below, and celebrating these calamities with cheerful hysteria.

  My brother, Francisco, and I had spent entire summers like this, until the year he’d left for the U.S. These were some of my favorite memories.

  But in the off-season, there was no sign of these young families. No children. They’d all gone north, back to the city or farther, so naturally, the arrival of one of the town’s wandering sons was both unexpected and welcome. My father and I moved through the plaza like rock stars, stopping at every bench to pay our respects, and from each of these aged men and women I heard the same thing. First: brief, rote condolences on the death of Raúl (it seems no one much cared for him); then, a smooth transition to the town’s most cherished topic of discussion, the past. The talk was directed at me:

  “Your old man was so smart, so brilliant . . .”

  My father nodded, politely accepting every compliment, not the least bit embarrassed by the attention. He’d carried the town’s expectations on his shoulders for so many years they no longer weighed on him. I’d heard these stories all my life.

  “This is my son,” he’d say. “You remember Nelson?”

  And one by one the old folks asked when I had come back from the United States.

  “No, no,” I said, “I’m the other son.”

  Of course, they got us confused, or perhaps simply forgot I existed. Their response, offered gently, hopefully: “Oh, yes, the other son.” Then, leaning forward: “So, when will you be leaving?”

  It was late summer, but the vacation season had come to an early close, and already the
weather had cooled. In the distance, you could hear the trucks humming along the highway. The bent men and stooped women wore light jackets and shawls, and seemed not to notice the sound. It was as if they’d all taken the same cocktail of sedatives, content to cast their eyes toward the sea, the dark night, and stay this way for hours. Now they wanted to know when I’d be leaving.

  I wanted to know too.

  “Soon,” I said.

  “Soon,” my father repeated.

  Even then I had my doubts, but I would keep believing this for another year or so.

  “Wonderful,” responded the town. “Just great.”

  My father and I settled in for the night at my great-uncle’s house. It had that stuffiness typical of shuttered spaces, of old people who live alone, made more acute by the damp ocean air. The spongy foam mattresses sagged and there were yellowing photographs everywhere—in dust-covered frames, in unruly stacks, or poking out of the books that lined the shelves of the living room. My father grabbed a handful and took them to the kitchen. He set the water to boil, flipping through them idly and calling out names of the relatives in each picture. There was a flatness to his voice, a distance—as if he were testing his recall, as opposed to reliving any cherished childhood memory. You got the sense he barely knew these people.

  He handed me a small black-and-white image with a matte finish, printed on heavy cardstock with scalloped edges. It was a group shot taken in front of this very house, back when it was surrounded by fallow land, the bare, undeveloped hillside. Perhaps twenty blurred faces.

  “Besides a few of the babies,” my father said, “everyone else in this photo is dead.”

  For a while we didn’t speak.

  A bloom of mold grew wild on that kitchen wall, bursting black and menacing from a crack in the concrete. To pass the time, or change the subject, we considered the mold’s shape, evocative of something, but we couldn’t say what. A baby carriage? A bull?