The King Is Always Above the People

by Daniel Alarcón

  I placed one hand at the small of Celia’s back, pulling her into me. The crowd continued to voice its disapproval, scandalized, but also—I felt certain—glad for us. The dance is complete. The virile foreigner has made his mark. The pretty girl has claimed her property. And it was the role of the gathered men to be appalled, or to pretend to be; the role of the mother to wail about her daughter’s chastity when she herself had never been chaste. But when it was over, when she and I separated, everyone was grinning. The old men, my father, even Elena.

  Celia and Nelson, most of all.

  —

  VERY LATE THAT NIGHT I called Rocío from the town’s only working pay phone. No, I did not feel any guilt. I just wanted to talk to her, perhaps laugh and discuss her lover’s murder. It must have been three or four in the morning, and I could not sleep. I’d begun to have doubts about what had happened, what it meant. A few hours before, it had all seemed triumphant; now it felt abusive. The plaza was empty, of course, just like the previous night, only more so—a kind of emptiness that feels eternal, permanent. I knew I would never come back to this place, and that realization made me a little sad. From where I stood, I could see the sloping streets, the ocean, the unblinking night; and nearer, the listing palm tree scarred with names. I would have written Celia’s name on it—a useless, purely romantic gesture, to be sure—but the truth is I never knew her name. I’ve chosen to call her Celia because it feels disrespectful to address her as the barwoman’s daughter. So impersonal, so anonymous. A barwoman’s daughter tastes of bubble gum and cigarettes, whereas Celia’s warm tongue had the flavor of roses.

  Santos and Cochocho and Jaime and Erick left us soon after the kiss, and it was just me and my father, still feeling amused by what had happened, what we’d been a part of. We felt a little shame too, but we didn’t talk about it because we didn’t know how. Grown men with hurt feelings are awkward creatures; grown men who feel dimly they have done something wrong are positively opaque. It would’ve been much simpler if we’d all just come to blows. Santos and Cochocho wandered off, a bit dazed, as if trying to piece together a crime, as if they’d been swindled. My father and I did a quick circle around the plaza, and begged off for the evening. We never ate. Our hunger had vanished. I tried and failed to sleep, spent hours listening to my father’s snores echoing through the house. Now I punched in the numbers from the phone card, and let it ring for a very long time. I wasn’t drunk anymore. I liked the sound because it had no point of origin: I could imagine it ringing in the city, in that apartment I shared with Rocío (where she was asleep and could not hear, or perhaps she was out with friends on this weekend night), but this was pure fantasy. I was not hearing that ring at all, of course. The ringing I heard came from inside the line, from somewhere within the wires, within the phone, an echo of something mysterious emerging from an unfixed and floating territory.

  I waited for a while, listening, comforted; but in the end, there was no answer.

  —

  WE LEFT THE NEXT MORNING; locked the house, dropped the key in the neighbor’s mail slot, and fled quickly, almost furtively, hoping to escape without having to say goodbye to anyone. I had a pounding headache, and I’d barely slept at all. We made it to the filling station at the top of the hill without attracting notice, and then paused. My father was at the wheel, and I could see this debate flaring up within him—whether to stop and fill the tank, or head north, away from this place and what it represented. Even the engine had doubt; it would not settle on an idling speed. We stopped. We had to. There might not be another station for many hours.

  It was Cochocho’s son tending the pumps. He was a miniature version of his father: the same frown, the same fussy irritation with the world. Everyone believes they deserve better, I suppose; and in this respect, he was no different from me. Though he was a few years younger than me, already the bitter outlines of his future were becoming clear to him. I didn’t want to admit that just then, and I disliked him intensely. He had fat, adolescent hands, and wore clothes that could have been handed down from Celia’s mother.

  “So you’re off, then?” the boy said to my father through the open window.

  The words were spoken without a hint of friendliness. His shoulders tensed, his jaw set in an expression of cold distrust. There was so much disdain seeping toward us, so determined and intentional, I almost found it funny. I felt like laughing, though I knew this would only make matters worse. Part of me—a large part—didn’t care: my chest was full of that big-city arrogance, false, pretentious, and utterly satisfying. The boy narrowed his eyes at us, but I was thinking to myself:

  Goodbye, sucker!

  “Long drive,” said Cochocho’s son.

  And I heard my father say, “A full day, more or less.”

  Then Cochocho’s son, to me: “Back to California?”

  I paused. Remembered. Felt annoyed. Nodded. A moment prior I’d decided to forget the boy, had dismissed him, disappeared him. My mind had gone blank, and I’d turned away from Cochocho’s unhappy son, casting my eyes down the hill instead, at the town and its homes obscured by a layer of fog.

  “That’s right,” I said, though California felt quite far away—as a theory, as a concept, to say nothing of an actual place where real human beings might live.

  “I used to work here, you know,” my old man offered.

  The boy nodded with sublime disinterest.

  “I’ve heard that,” he said. “But it belongs to us now.”

  My father didn’t answer.

  The tank was filled, and an hour later we were emptying our pockets for the bored, greedy soldiers. They were the age of Cochocho’s son, and just as friendly. Three hours after that, we were passing through Joselito’s hometown, in time to see a funeral procession; his, we supposed. It moved slowly alongside the highway, a somber cloud of gray and black, anchored by the doleful sounds of an out-of-tune brass band. The two men who’d fought over the mototaxi now stood side by side, holding an end of the casket, quite obviously heartbroken. Whether or not they were acting now, I wouldn’t dare to speculate. But I did ease the car almost to a stop; and I did roll down my window and ask my old man to roll down his. And we listened to the band’s song, with its impossibly slow melody, like time stretched thin. We stayed there a minute, not more, as they marched away from us, toward the cemetery. It felt like a whole day. Then we were at the edge of the city; and then we were home, as if nothing had happened at all.

  EXTINCT ANATOMIES

  I’D BEEN IN LIMA for the first half of the year. For two months—winter months in the Southern Hemisphere—I visited my cousin’s dental office every Tuesday. I’d gotten financing for a recording project in Lima, and since I had no insurance back in the States, it seemed like a good time to get my teeth fixed. Before I left, my girlfriend let me know she approved.

  “Maybe,” she said, “it will make you more willing to smile.”

  My cousin and I had a standing appointment, which I kept at all costs. My case was a difficult one, he told me again and again, repeating it so often I began to take some pride in this. “How’d you break your front teeth?” he asked on my first visit, and without hesitating, I described a schoolyard fight I’d once observed—two brave, wiry boys pummeling each other with abandon. In my telling, I was one of the boys.

  Interesting, my cousin said. He ordered X-rays, as if to confirm my story.

  When I was a boy, my cousin lived with my family in Birmingham, Alabama. He went to the local public school, and most weeknights, one young lady or another would phone our house and ask to speak to—and here she would stretch out his name in an impossible southern drawl—and my mother, always severe, would correct her, then call it out loud. Upon hearing his name, my cousin would race to the kitchen like a man on fire, stretching the long cord into the hallway, where he’d spend an hour whispering his broken, seductive English into the receiver. In matters of flirting
, he was a minimalist: “Oh, your hair,” he’d say, or, “Oh, your eyes.” I’d eavesdrop, unable to fathom what a girl might say in response to these cues. When it was over, he’d lock himself in the bathroom, emerge a while later showered and combed, and as we prepared for bed, my cousin, flummoxed and anxious, would ask me in Spanish: “What do American girls want?”

  I was eight years old.

  Now my weekly dental appointments were the only time we saw each other. We didn’t talk much. I spent most of our time together with my mouth open, blinded by the overhead lamp, trying to block out the sound and sensation of the drill. I curled my toes in my shoes, or jammed my hands into my pockets and squeezed my wallet like a man being mugged. I’m sensitive to pain, I told him on that first day, hoping he would be gentle.

  He smiled. “I know,” he said. “I remember from when we were kids.”

  My cousin’s regular assistant was young, a novice, charged mainly with suctioning spit from my mouth with a transparent plastic tube. To accomplish this task she hovered close, blinking her gentle, unjudging eyes at me, and though I rarely saw her without a face mask, I’d begun, over the course of my long and complicated treatment, to imagine she was quite beautiful. My cousin sawed my teeth, chipped them, filed them, burnished them, polished them, bleached them, carved them, and all through this torturous process his assistant wiped spittle from my cheeks with an affectionate gesture and an invisible smile I’d come to crave. In the course of these endless appointments, I’d established certain routines, ones that involved sublimating the discomfort of the drill with thoughts of sex. I undressed my cousin’s dental assistant with my eyes. My girlfriend had stayed back in the States, and though things were not well between us, I was attempting fidelity, and managing this famine only by giving myself certain creative license. How else to survive? There was nothing to look at but the assistant or the unadorned walls, and naturally I preferred to imagine what juicy lips were hidden behind her protective face mask. I tore off her white uniform—why not, I could see through it anyway!—bent her over the counter, and tongued her ear until it sparkled.

  My cousin was planning to marry a woman named Carmen, who was finishing her last year of law school. She was lovely, short and curvaceous, and wore her dark bangs pressed diagonally against her forehead with a rigid Plasticine gel. Unlike American girls, she was quite clear about what she wanted. For starters: a church wedding. A white dress. A slow waltz before the entire family, and camera flashes popping from every direction. A bottle of whiskey on each table, and a tawdry night at the Sheraton in Miraflores, overlooking the sea. Later: a passel of children who’d study at the American school, a house with a room for the maid, and a garden to receive guests. These were things anyone could tell just by looking at her, perfectly reasonable goals in this city, and there were others too, which my cousin hinted at on occasion with a sly smile. Oh, your hair, I thought, Oh, your eyes. I kept my mouth open and listened as he told me of weekend visits to chapels all over Lima, how much they cost, how far in advance these houses of worship had to be reserved. Nothing aroused her more than wedding talk, he said to me, a fact he considered curious. He was enjoying himself so much he was hoping to postpone the wedding for another year, longer if possible.

  It was early August, a busy day for both of us, and my cousin and I met in late afternoon. I had temporary caps on five of my teeth, two of which would be coming off that day. His dental assistant had gone home, he said when I arrived, and I contemplated with horror the sexless hour of dental torture that awaited me.

  My cousin must have seen my anxious look.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Carmen is coming.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Isn’t she a lawyer?”

  He shrugged. Yes, it was true. Technically speaking, she was not trained. But was it that difficult? He spread his arms wide, as if embracing the entire room. “Is any of this really that difficult?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He leaned in: “I studied in Oregon for three years, cousin. Three years. And you want to know the truth? I could have done it in two.”

  “Wow,” I said, as he held up two fingers. A peace sign, half a set of air quotes, a pair of scissors.

  Carmen arrived a few minutes later in a black miniskirt and a sky-blue wool sweater. She looked great, and this was precisely what I’d been afraid of. My cousin’s dental office faced a major avenue, and at rush hour, traffic moved slowly and noisily, an unyielding army of gaseous vehicles. Rank fumes, blaring sirens, the intermittent screech of brakes. Even at eight in the evening, the bedlam had not eased. I will think of the traffic, I told myself, and it seemed like a solution: What could be more stifling to the human sexual impulse than these sounds, these smells, these tortured, broken-down, and dying cars and buses, these accidents-in-waiting, these flat tires and stolen mirrors, these dented doors and missing hubcaps, these potholed streets that cannot bear them all? I feel happy. Blissfully asexual. Then my cousin and Carmen put on their surgical gloves. She does not wear a face mask. The drill starts up. I will not think of my cousin’s wife-to-be, I tell myself. I will not think of her red lips, or notice how attentive she is, how tender when she leans over me to wipe my face, how her breasts just graze my arm.

  But something changes. A cap is removed with what amounts to a hammer blow, and the pain forces my eyes shut. I open them, and Carmen is staring: I offer her an ugly stump-toothed smile. She turns away, and now they are talking about the wedding as if I’m not there: the chapel, the floral arrangement, the priest, the readings. And I’m confused: my brain can’t decide between traffic or sex, weddings or sex, white walls or sex, though none of these is actually within reach. Spit is running down my cheek, to my neck, where it soaks the collar of my sweater. It’s warm. I’d like to think of my girlfriend, but I can’t make her image appear. I’d like to think of my cousin’s assistant, but she is halfway home by now, wherever home might be, sedated by the narcotic stop and start of a packed city bus. I’d like to think of Carmen, who is beautiful and demanding and doesn’t notice or care that rivulets of spit have soaked into the chair now and are creeping south along my spine. There’s a dress, she tells my cousin (not me, I’m not even there), a lovely white dress she’s been looking at, and as she describes it in greater and greater detail—its lacy, open-backed elegance—I turn to my cousin, who withdraws a metal hook from my mouth and winks. I nod, I get the message, and in my mind, I’m pulling the hem of this not-quite-virginal dress up Carmen’s thighs and burying my face between her legs. As if to punish me, my cousin takes out the hammer and bangs on my teeth. Another cap comes off, and now my smile is even more grotesque. They offer me a mirror, but I decline. Unfortunately, I know exactly what I look like. I’m far from home. My eyes burn. My cousin is distracted by all this wedding talk. He spends more time looking at his fiancée than at me. They are playing footsie beneath the reclining dental chair. I can’t see it, but I know.

  Then the drill strikes a nerve and I sit up, startled and wide-eyed.

  Carmen stops in mid-sentence. Her bangs glisten.

  “You’re all wet,” she says.

  “Are you all right?” my cousin asks. “Has something happened?”

  REPÚBLICA AND GRAU

  THE BLIND MAN LIVED in a single room above a bodega, on a street not so far from Maico’s house. It was up a slight hill, as was everything in the neighborhood. There was nothing on the walls of the blind man’s room, nor was there anywhere to sit, and so Maico stood. He was ten years old. There was a single bed, a nightstand with a radio wrapped in duct tape, a washbasin. The blind man had graying hair and was much older than Maico’s father. The boy looked at his feet, and kicked together a small mound of dust on the concrete floor while his father and the blind man spoke. The boy didn’t listen, but then no one expected him to. He was not surprised when a tiny black spider emerged from the insignificant pile he had made. It skittered across the flo
or and disappeared beneath the bed. Maico raised his eyes. A cobweb glittered in an upper corner. It was the room’s only decoration.

  His father reached out and shook the blind man’s hand. “So it’s agreed,” Maico’s father said, and the blind man nodded, and this was all.

  —

  A WEEK LATER, Maico and the blind man were in the city, at the noisy intersection of República and Grau. They had risen early on a winter morning of low, leaden skies, and made their way to the center, to this place of snarling, bleating traffic, in the shadow of a great hotel. The blind man carried a red-tipped cane, and he knew the route well, but once they arrived he folded the cane and left it in the grassy median. His steps became tentative, and Maico understood that the pretending had begun. The blind man’s smile disappeared, and his jaw went slack.

  Everything there was to know Maico learned in that first hour. The lights were timed: there were three minutes of work, followed by three minutes of waiting. When the traffic stopped, the blind man put one hand on the boy’s shoulder and with the other held out his tin, and together they walked up the row of idling cars. Maico led him toward the cars with windows rolled down, and the blind man muttered helplessly as he approached each one. Maico’s only job was to steer him toward those who were likely to give, and make sure that he did not waste time on those who would not. Women driving alone were, according to the blind man, preemptively generous, hoping, in this way, to avoid being robbed. They kept small coins in their ashtrays for just such transactions. Taxi drivers could be counted on as well, because they were working people, and men with women always wanted to impress and might let slip a few coins to show their sensitive side. Men driving alone rarely gave, and not a moment should be squandered beside a car with tinted windows. “If they know you can’t see them,” the blind man said, “they don’t feel shame.”