The King Is Always Above the People

by Daniel Alarcón

  No, it was something else.

  “Joselito’s mototaxi,” my father said.

  And this was, in fact, exactly what it resembled.

  “May he rest in peace,” I added.

  Poor Joselito. His mototaxi somehow imprinted on the wall in mold, transformed into a blackish-green blob; the only detail missing was the spinning wheel. We’d left the town without learning a thing about him—not how he died, not how old he was, not whom he’d left behind. The fight had ended shortly after the town elder stepped between the antagonists; ended, in fact, with a generalized sigh, then a cheer, which somehow became a dirge, and then suddenly, all around us, everyone wept openly for the dead man. The town elder too, who’d seemed only a moment before so determined and fierce and imperturbable, now strained to hold back tears, biting his lip, shaking from the effort to keep his emotions under control. I noticed the wheel had finally stopped. The fighters embraced, and then everyone did, except my father, who stood apart from it all. I tried to pull him in, but he shrugged me off, and then the barefoot, tattooed boy took my hand and dragged me to the center of this lachrymose circle of strangers. I didn’t cry, but I wasn’t opposed to it. Only the tears wouldn’t come.

  My father had been quiet for most of the trip—coming home always did this to him—but he spoke up now. Joselito, he said, must have been a real character. Someone special. He hadn’t seen an outpouring of emotion like that in many years, not since he was a boy.

  “It was an act,” I said, and began to explain my theory.

  My old man interrupted me. “But what isn’t?”

  What he meant was, people perform sorrow for a reason. For example: no one in this town was performing it for Raúl. My great-uncle had been mayor of this town when my father was a boy, had owned the filling station, and sired seven children with five different women, none of whom he bothered to marry. He’d run the town’s only radio station for a decade, and paid from his own pocket to pave the main boulevard so he could drive in style. Then in the late 1980s, he lost most of his money, and settled into a bitter seclusion. I remembered him only for his bulbous nose, and his hatred of foreigners, an expansive category in which he placed anyone who wasn’t originally from the town and its surrounding areas. Raúl’s distrust of the capital was absolute. I was eleven the last time I saw him, and I don’t think he ever trusted me.

  It was easier to talk about Joselito than about my great-uncle. More pleasant perhaps. This town brought up bad memories for my father, who was, in those days, entering a pensive late middle age. That was how it seemed to me at the time; but what does a twenty-two-year-old know about a grown man’s life and worries? Very little, of course. I was too young to recognize what would later seem more than obvious: that I was the greatest source of my old man’s concern. That, if he was growing old too soon, I was at least partly to blame. This would’ve been clear had I been paying attention. We hadn’t come to see about Raúl or his house or his things. We’d come to see about me.

  My father shifted the conversation in that direction. He asked me what I planned to do when I got to California. This was typical of the time, a speculative game we were fond of playing. We assumed it was fast approaching, the date of my departure; later I would think we’d all been pretending.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I’d spent so much time imagining it—my leaving, my preparations, my victory lap around the city, saying goodbye and good luck to all those who’d be staying behind—but what came after contained few specifics. I’d get off the plane, and then . . . Francisco, I guess, would be there. He’d drive me across the Bay Bridge to Oakland, and introduce me to his life there, whatever that might be. From time to time, when curiosity seized me, I searched for this place online and found news items that helped me begin to envision it: shootings mostly, but also minor political scandals involving graft or misused patronage or a city official with liens on his property; occasionally something really exciting, like an oil tanker lost in fog and hitting a bridge, or the firebombing of a liquor store by one street gang or another. There’d even been a minor riot not too long before, with the requisite smashed windows, a dumpster in flames, and a set of multiracial anarchists wearing bandannas across their faces so that all you could see in the photos were their alert and feral eyes; and I’d wondered then how my brother had chosen to live in a city whose ambience so closely mimicked our own. Could it really be an accident of geography? Or was it some latent homing instinct?

  What it all had to do with me was never quite clear. Where I would fit in. What I would do with myself once I was there. These were among the many questions that remained. The visa, whenever it came, would not arrive with life instructions. Nor would it obligate me to stay in Oakland, of course, and I had considered other alternatives, though none very seriously and all based on a whimsical set of readings and the occasional Internet search: Philadelphia I liked for its history; Miami for its tropical ennui; Chicago for its poets; Los Angeles for its sheer size.

  But one can start over in any number of places, right? Any number of times?

  “I’ll get a job,” I told my father. “Isn’t that what Americans do?”

  “It’s what everyone does. In a copy shop?”

  “I’m an actor.”

  “Who makes photocopies.”

  I frowned. “So I’ll make photocopies my entire life. Why not?”

  He wanted me to study, because that was what he’d wanted for himself so many years before. And for Francisco too. He’d hoped my brother would be a professor by now, an academic, though he was far too proud to ever share this disappointment with me. He had his own issues with me: his unbounded respect for playwrights and artists and writers was completely abstract—on a more concrete level, he wished I’d considered some more reliable way to earn a living. As for my day job, my mother told me once that seeing me work as the attendant at the copy shop made my old man sad. His unexpressed sadness, in turn, made me angry. His politics affirmed that all work held an inherent dignity. This was what he’d always repeated, but of course no ideology can protect a son from the unwelcome inheritance of his father’s ambitions.

  “When I was a boy,” my father said, “this town was the middle of nowhere. It still is, I know. But imagine it before they rerouted the highway. We knew there was something else out there—another country to the south, the capital to the north—but it felt very far away.”

  “It was.”

  “You’re right. It was. We were hours from civilization. Six or seven to the border, if not more. But the roads were awful. And spiritually—it was even farther. It required a certain kind of imagination to see it.”

  I smiled. I thought I was making him laugh, but really I was just trying to close off the conversation, shut it down before it headed somewhere I didn’t want it to go: “I’ve always been very imaginative,” I said.

  My old man knew what I was doing, even if I didn’t.

  “Yes, son. You have. Maybe not imaginative enough, though.”

  I didn’t want to ask him what he meant, so I sat, letting it linger until the silence forced him to answer my unspoken question.

  “I’m sorry,” my father said. “I wonder if you’ve thought much about your future, that’s all.

  “Sure I have. All the time.”

  “To the exclusion of thinking about your present?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “What would you say?”

  I paused, attempting to strip my voice of any anger before I spoke: “I’ve thought a great deal about my future, so that my present could seem more livable.”

  He nodded slowly. The cups steamed, and we sipped our tea carefully. For once, I was grateful for my old man’s obsession with tea—it allowed us to pause, gather our thoughts. It excused us from having to talk, and the danger of saying things we might not mean.

  “You and Rocío
seem well.”

  I never spoke about my relationships with my parents. They’d only met Rocío a few times.

  “Sure. We’re doing fine.”

  There was something else he wanted to ask me, but he didn’t. He was wondering how to phrase his concern. He narrowed his eyes, thinking, and then something changed in his face—a slackness emerged, the edges of his mouth dropped. He’d given up.

  “I always hated this house,” my old man said after a few minutes. “I can’t imagine that anyone would want it. We should bulldoze the thing and be done with it.”

  It was all the same to me, and I told him so. We could set it on fire, or shatter every last brick with a sledgehammer. I had no attachments to this place, to this town. My father did, but he preferred not to think about them. It was a place to visit with a heavy heart, when an old relative died. Or with your family on holiday, if such a luxury could be afforded. Francisco, it occurred to me, might feel the same way toward the city where we’d been raised.

  “I’ve let you down,” my old man said. His voice was timid, hushed, as if he hadn’t wanted me to hear.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “We should have pushed you harder, sent you away sooner. Now . . .” He didn’t finish, but I understood that now, in his estimation, was far too late.

  “It’s fine.”

  “I know it is. Everyone’s fine. I’m fine, you’re fine, your mother’s fine too. Even Francisco is fine, or so the rumor goes, God bless the USA. Everything is fine. Just ask the mummies sitting on the benches out there. They spend every evening telling the same five stories again and again, but if you ask them, they’ll respond with a single voice that everything is just fine. What do we have to complain about?”

  “I’m not complaining,” I said.

  “I know you aren’t. That’s precisely what concerns me.”

  I slumped, feeling deflated. “I’ll leave when the visa comes. I can’t leave before that. I can’t do anything before that.”

  My father winced. “But it isn’t entirely accurate to say you can’t do anything, is it?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Consider this: What if it doesn’t come? Or what if it comes at an inconvenient time. Let’s say you’re in love with Rocío—”

  “Let’s suppose.”

  “And she doesn’t want to leave. So then you stay. What will you do then?”

  He was really asking: What are you doing right now?

  When I didn’t say anything, he pressed further, his voice rising in pitch: “Tell me, son. Are you sure you even want that visa? Are you absolutely certain? Do you know yet what you’re going to do with your life?”

  —

  WE WERE DETERMINED not to shout at each other. Eventually, he went to bed, and I left the house for a walk along the town’s perfectly desolate streets, where there was not a car to be seen, nor a person. You could hear the occasional truck roaring by in the distance, but fewer at this hour, like a sporadic wind. It looked like an abandoned stage set, and I wondered: Who’s absolutely certain about anything? I found a pay phone not far from the plaza, and called Rocío. I wanted her to make me laugh, and I sighed with relief when she answered on the first ring, as if she’d been waiting for my call. Maybe she had. I told her about the drive, about the fight we witnessed, about my great-uncle’s dank and oppressive house, filled with pictures of racehorses and marching bands and the various women who’d borne his children and had their hopes and their hearts shattered by this cruel, lonely man. I didn’t tell her about the conversation with my father.

  “I’ve taken a lover,” Rocío said, interrupting.

  It was a game we played; I tried to muster the energy to play along. I didn’t want to disappoint her. “And what’s he like?”

  “Handsome, in an ugly sort of way. Crooked nose, giant cock. More than adequate.”

  “I’m dying of jealousy,” I said. “Literally dying. The life seeps from my tired body.”

  “Did you know that by law, if a man finds his wife sleeping with another man on their marriage bed, he’s allowed to murder them both?”

  “I hadn’t heard that. But what if he finds them on the couch?”

  “Then he can’t kill them. Legally speaking.”

  “So did you sleep with him on our bed?”

  “Yes,” Rocío answered. “Many, many times.”

  “And was his name Joselito?”

  There was quiet. “Yes. That was his name.”

  “I’ve already had him killed.”

  “But I just saw him this morning.”

  “He’s gone, baby. Say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” she whispered.

  I was satisfied with myself. She asked me about the town, and I told her that everyone confused me with my brother. So many years separated my family from this place that they’d simply lost track of me. There was room in their heads for only one son; was it any surprise they chose Francisco?

  “Oh, that’s so sad!” Rocío said. She was mocking me.

  “I’m not telling you so you’ll feel sorry for me.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know,” she said, stretching out the word in a way she probably thought was cute, but that just annoyed me.

  “I’m hanging up now.” The phone card was running out anyway.

  “Good night, Joselito,” Rocío said, and blew a kiss into the receiver.

  —

  WE SPENT A FEW HOURS the next morning in my great-uncle’s house, sifting through the clutter, in case there was anything we might want to take back with us. There wasn’t. My father set some items aside for the soldiers, should it come to that; nothing very expensive, but things he thought might look expensive if you were a bored young man with a rifle who’d missed all the action by a few years, and were serving your time standing by the side of a highway, collecting tribute: a silver picture frame, an antique camera in pristine condition, an old but very ornate trophy that would surely come back to life with a little polish. It didn’t make much sense, of course; these young men wanted one of two things, I told my father: cash or electronics. Sex, perhaps, but probably not with us. Anything else was meaningless. My father agreed. We’d have to pay them or outrun them or dress up as women and be abused by them. Charming options all.

  Our unfinished conversation was not mentioned.

  After lunch, we headed into town. There was some paperwork to be filed in order to transfer Raúl’s property over to a distant cousin of ours, an unmarried woman of fifty who still lived nearby, and might have some use for the house. Raúl’s children wanted nothing, refused, on principle, to be involved. My father was dreading this transfer, of course; not because he was reluctant to give up the property—he was, in fact, eager to be rid of it—but because he was afraid of how many hours this relatively simple bureaucratic chore might require. But he hadn’t taken his local celebrity into account, and of course we were received at city records with the same bright and enthusiastic palaver with which we’d been welcomed in the plaza the night before. We were taken around to greet each of the dozen municipal employees, friendly men and women of my father’s generation and older, who welcomed the interruption because they quite clearly had nothing to do. It was just like evenings in the plaza, I thought, only behind desks and under fluorescent lights. Many of them claimed some vague familial connection to me, especially the older ones, and so I began calling them all uncle and auntie just to be safe. Again and again I was mistaken for Francisco—“When did you get back? Where are you living now?”—and I began to respond with increasingly imprecise answers, so that finally, when we’d made it inside the last office, the registrar of properties, I simply gave in to this assumption, and said, when asked: “I live in California.”

  It felt good to say it. A relief.

  The registr
ar was a small, very round man named Juan, with dark skin and a raspy voice. He’d been my father’s best friend in third grade, or so he claimed. My old man didn’t bother to contradict him, only smiled in such a way that I understood it to be untrue; or if not untrue exactly, then one of those statements that time had rendered unverifiable, and about which there was no longer any use debating.

  The registrar liked my answer. He loosened his tie and clapped his hands: “California! Oh my! So what do you do there?”

  My father gave me a once-over. “Yes,” he said now. “Tell my old friend Juan what you do.”

  I thought back to all those letters my brother had written, all those stories of his I’d read and very nearly memorized in my adolescence. It didn’t matter, of course: I could have told Juan any number of things: about my work as a ski instructor, or as a baggage handler, or as a bike-repair technician. I could have told him the ins and outs of Walmart, about life in American small towns, about the shifting customs and mores of different regions of the vast United States. The accents, the landscapes, the winters. Anything I said at that moment would’ve worked just fine. But I went with something simple and current, guessing correctly that Juan wasn’t much interested in details. There were a few facts I knew about my brother, in spite of the years and the distance: a man named Hassan had taken him under his wing. They were in business together, selling baby formula and low-priced denim and vegetables that didn’t last more than a day. The details were arcane to me, but it was a government program, which, somehow, was making them both very rich.

  “I work with an Arab,” I said. “We have a store.”

  The registrar nodded severely, as if processing this critical information. “The Arabs are very able businessmen,” he said finally. “You must learn everything you can from this Arab.”

  “I intend to.”

  “So you can be rich!”

  “That’s the idea,” I said.

  A smile flashed across Juan’s face. “And the American girls? Ehhhhh?”