The King Is Always Above the People

by Daniel Alarcón

  The space was neatly laid out, as I had assumed it would be, and dark, with no lightbulbs anywhere and no photos, not of family, not of each other. Because the long, damp winters are even longer and damper in this part of the city, heavy translucent plastic sheeting hung from every doorway in wide strips, so that moving from one room to another required a motion not unlike swimming the butterfly stroke. The idea was to trap heat in each room, but the effect, along with the hazy light, was to give the house the look and feel of an aquarium. I parted the plastic curtains, and found myself in a sparsely furnished kitchen, kept in meticulous order. The refrigerator was nearly empty, and there were no extra utensils in the drawers, just a pair of everything—two forks, two spoons, two steak knives. I opened the tap and a thin line of water dribbled into a single dirty bowl. There was another one, a clean bowl already dry, sitting by the sink.

  I walked to the bedroom, as spare and clean as the kitchen, where a small wooden cross hung just above the neatly made bed. I opened and closed a few drawers, looked into the closet, and found two pairs of glasses in a box on top of the dresser, one with plastic yellow lenses, one with blue. I tried on the yellow pair, charmed by this small evidence of my uncle’s vanity, and even found myself looking for a mirror. Of course, there wasn’t one. This is all mine, I thought, to dispose of as I see fit. To sell, or rent, or burn, or give away. There was nothing of my family in this house, and maybe that was the only attractive thing about it. My father kept everything of any value, and Ramón got everything else, all this nothing—these clothes, this cheap furniture, this undecorated room and nondescript house, this parcel of land in a neighborhood whose name no one could agree on. It was all paid for, the lawyer told me, they owned it outright, and my uncle had no debts to speak of. Unfortunately, he also had no heirs besides his wife, and she had none besides him. I was the nearest living relative.

  After a long pause, the lawyer added: “Well, except for your father.”

  “What do I do with it?”

  “See if there’s anything you want to keep. You can sell the rest. It’s up to you.”

  And now I was here, hidden in the Thousands. At home, my phone was ringing, the city’s frantic journalists demanding a statement. Soon they would be camping out in front of the asylum, tossing handwritten notes over the walls and into the gardens, or crowding before the door to my house, harassing my children, my wife. Say something; entertain us with your worries, your fears, your discontent, blame your father, the men who built the bridge, or the ponytailed truck driver. Blame your blind uncle, his blind wife, the fireworks vendors, or yourself. My head hurt. I miss Ramón, I thought, and just as quickly the very idea seemed selfish. I hadn’t seen him in years.

  Carlotta had stayed in the living room, and from the hallway I watched her blurred outline through the plastic. I swam through the house to see her.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “I’m sorry to make you wait.”

  She had nested into the soft cushions of my uncle and aunt’s white sofa. There was a throw rug on the floor, somewhere near the middle of the room, and the soles of her feet hung just above, not touching it. Her hands lay in her lap. She seemed much younger in the subdued light of my uncle’s home, her skin glowing, and her hair, graying in the daylight, appeared, in this shadowed room, to be almost black.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  It was a fair question, for which I had no answer.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Maybe I could live here.”

  Carlotta smiled generously. “You’re not feeling well,” she said.

  My wife would be surprised this evening when I told her about my day. She listened patiently as we prepared a meal, our daughters clamoring for our attention, and told me only that I must be careful. That places like that weren’t safe. She’d never been to The Thousands or Venice or Gaza, but like all of us, believed many things about our city without needing them confirmed. Hadn’t there been a famous murder there a few years ago? And didn’t this latest accident only prove again that our world had nothing to do with that one? And I agreed quietly, “Yes, dear, you’re right, he was my uncle, my brother, but I barely knew him”—and I stopped my story there. I walked around the counter, gave her a kiss on the neck, picked up my eldest daughter, and laughed: Ramón’s yellow glasses, can you believe it? His blue ones? His yellow house? And we put the girls to sleep, my wife went to bed, and me, I stayed in the living room, watching television, flipping channels, thinking.

  “What will you do with it all?” my wife asked as she leaned against the doorjamb already in her nightclothes, and I could see the graceful outline of her body beneath the fabric. She was barefoot, her toes curling into the thick carpet.

  “I was thinking we should move there,” I said, just to hear her horrified laughter.

  She disappeared into the bedroom without saying good night.

  “Did you know them well?” I asked Carlotta.

  She thought about this for a second. “They were my neighbors.”

  “But did you know them?”

  “I saw them every day,” she said.

  And this means a good deal, I know it does. There was a time when I saw him every week, and we were closer then, maybe even something like brothers. “Ramón and I grew up together. And then we lost touch.”

  “You look tired,” Carlotta said. “Why don’t you sit? It might make you feel better.”

  But I didn’t want to, not yet. I went to the record player, lifted the dull plastic dustcover. A few dozen old LPs leaned against the wall, and I thumbed through them: they were my grandfather’s opera records. I put one on, a woman’s elegant voice warbled through the room, and just like that, this melody I hadn’t heard in so long—decades—dropped my temperature, and made the ceiling seem very far above me, at an unnatural height. Carlotta tapped her toe to the music, though it seemed utterly rhythmless to me. It was true: I didn’t feel well.

  “What did people think of them in the neighborhood?” I asked.

  “Everyone loved them.”

  “But no one knew them?”

  “We didn’t have to know them.”

  And I thought about that, as the singing went on in Italian, a lustrous female voice, and I was struck by the image of the two of them—Ramón and Matilde—sitting on this very same couch, my aunt whispering translations directly into his ear. Love songs, songs about desperate passion, about lovers who died together. I could almost see it: his smile lighting up this drab room, Matilde’s lips pressed against him. They had died that way, best friends, strolling hand in hand off the edge of a bridge, until they sank. I sat down on the throw rug, leaning back against the sofa, staring ahead at an unadorned wall. My feet were very cold. My eyes had adjusted to the light now, and the house seemed almost antiseptic. Clean. Preposterously dustless for this part of the city. We sat listening to the aria, Carlotta and I, a melody spiraling out into the infinite. The singer had such energy, and the more she drew upon it, the weaker I felt. I could stay here; I might never leave. I could inherit this life my uncle had left behind, walk away, I thought, from my old man and his venom.

  “My father did everything he could to ruin my uncle,” I said. “He cheated him out of his inheritance. He’s in prison now, where he belongs.”

  “I know. I read about him today in the paper. They talked to him.”

  For a moment I thought I had misheard. “What? Which paper?”

  I turned to see Carlotta smiling proudly. Perhaps she hadn’t heard the terror in my voice. Already I’d begun imagining all the horrible things my father might say, the conspiracy theories, the racist remarks, the angry insults with which he might have desecrated the memory of his dead brother.

  “I don’t remember the name of it,” Carlotta said. “The same one I was in.”

  “What did my father say?”

  “There were journalists all ov
er the neighborhood yesterday. My son was on television. Did you see him?”

  I raised my voice, suddenly impatient: “But what did he say?”

  “Mr. Cano,” Carlotta whispered.

  Her shoulders were hunched, and she had leaned back into the couch, as if to protect herself, as if I might attack her. I realized, with horror, that I had frightened her. She knew who my father was. I stammered an apology.

  She took a deep breath now. “He said he didn’t have a brother. That he didn’t know anyone named Ramón.”

  “That’s all?” I asked, and Carlotta nodded.

  “No one named Ramón,” I said to myself, “no brother.”

  She stared at me like I was crazy. How could I explain that it didn’t sound like him, that it was too sober, too calm?

  “Why would he say that?” Carlotta asked.

  I shook my head. I felt my eyes getting heavier. Was it cruel or just right? “We should go,” I said, “I’m very sorry, there’s nothing here I need,” but it wasn’t true, and I couldn’t leave. We sat, not speaking, not moving, only breathing, until I became aware that Carlotta was patting my head with a maternal affection, that my shoulders were sinking farther toward the floor, and I gave into it: loosened my tie, wiggling my toes in my socks, my feet frozen, the chill having spread through my body now.

  This record will not end, I thought, I hoped, but then it did: a long, fierce note held without the orchestra, culminating in a shout of joy from the singer, the audience chastened, stunned by the beauty of it. A long silence, and then slowly, applause, soft at first, then waves of it, which on this old recording came across like a pounding rain. I was shivering. There was no question we were underwater.

  THE LORD RIDES A SWIFT CLOUD

  THE TOWN ITSELF was interesting enough, with crumbling houses and narrow streets full of people who seemed not to know how to hurry. I learned to walk slowly and so this pace was not difficult for me. That day was absurdly sunny. In the afternoon I rode one of the funiculars to the top of a hill, an outcropping of rock high above the sea where the wind blew so hard it forced my eyes shut and dusted my face with a fine film. From there, between gusts, I could see the port, its gleaming metal claws, its workers scurrying between acres of containers stacked one on top of the other. Beyond it was the ocean, a beautiful, roiling sheet of silver.

  Of course, the real work of the day was pretending I wasn’t lonely. By late afternoon I had given up, so I went to a bar down in the flats, a place that looked and smelled like the inside of a ship: the air was sooty and humid, the walls were held up by wooden beams curved like ribs. At any moment I thought they would give and the ocean would leak through, slowly at first, then with a deafening crash, and drown us all. There were five or six men at the bar. None sat together.

  Nearly every inch of the place was covered with photographs: of politicians and starlets, soccer players and singers. The wall behind the bar was reserved for portraits of garlanded racehorses and their jockeys. I read for a bit, but the light was dim and I could barely make out the words. There was no music and very little conversation. The men nodded at the bartender, and drinks appeared before them in almost soundless transactions. I was there an hour before anyone said a word to me. It was an older gentleman in a worn navy sport coat. He said: “You read so beautifully.”

  The way I felt in those days, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the slightest to discover that I’d been reading aloud. I blanched. “How do you know?”

  “You’re so still.”

  Which struck me as funny. I’d been traveling at that point for eight weeks and already the town was fading. The next day I would be heading south, relentlessly southward, and in ten days I would be home again for the first time in two years. But I suppose everything about me gave the impression of a wounded man, determined not to move. I had not spoken to my wife in many months. The effort it took not to think of her was so great that in the evenings my bones ached.

  “Cheers,” I said.

  He told me his name was Marcial. “I’m retired,” he said. “It’s wonderful.” He paused, as if expecting me to respond, but I didn’t. I must have glanced down at my book again. “May I?” he asked.

  He was unshaven and had a tired look to him. His hair was completely, shockingly white. I passed him the book. It was all so tactile: he felt its texture, fanned its pages roughly, and smiled at the satisfying sound they made. He commented on the novel’s weight. There was a woman on the cover, a stern, dark-haired beauty, looking down a Paris street. Or something like that. He ran his index finger over her face. “She’s pretty,” he said.

  We clinked glasses. “I want you to understand my story,” Marcial said. “When my wife died, I told our children that I would drink for a year and then find a new woman.”

  It was difficult to tell in the low light if he was a man at the beginning or the end of a yearlong bender. “How is that working out?”

  His beard was growing in white. He scratched the stubble. “Very well,” he said. “I have three months to go.”

  Eventually a television came on, and I pretended to read while Marcial followed a soccer match with muted enthusiasm. There was a red team and a blue team. When pressed, I sided with red, and this was met with approval. A few more people came in, some others left, but the real story I want to tell here is about how this man followed me home. It was late when I finally left, but it seemed much later. It seemed, in fact, like it should already be morning. It was a short walk to the hotel. As I gathered myself to go, Marcial pulled a few bills from his coat pocket and dropped them on the bar.

  “No tip?” the bartender said. He was a dour man in his fifties, thin and balding, who had watched the entire soccer match without a sound, his hands folded neatly in his lap.

  Marcial turned to me. “This man is the owner. I can’t tip him because it would be an insult. Tips are for workers.”

  “What logic,” the owner said. “There are other bars in town.”

  “But this one is special,” Marcial said. He winked at me.

  I paid and said my goodbyes. Marcial must have walked out right behind me, but a low, heavy fog had blown in, so I didn’t notice him until I had reached the door of the hotel. He was ten paces back, shuffling up the hill. When he saw that I had seen him, he shrugged and, with great slowness, sat down on the curb, stretching his legs into the empty street. “I’m not following you,” he said. “Just so you know. I’ve come to look at the park.”

  Across the street, bathed in fog, there was indeed a tiny, manicured park, with regal stone benches and neatly trimmed rosebushes. Somehow I hadn’t noticed it that morning. It seemed to have been dropped in from another country, an imitation of a postcard sent from far, far away.

  “There was a building there,” Marcial said. “It wasn’t a nice building. It was a dump. Full of Czechs and Russians, and the whole world knows they’re slovenly people. But in the alley behind it—can you picture this?—where the wooden fence is now.” He pointed. “There! I kissed my wife in that spot when we were seventeen. We scratched our names in the bricks with my switchblade. Of course, you had to carry a knife in those days, not like now.” He said this last line in a tone of great disappointment. “For example, you don’t carry a knife, do you?”

  “No,” I said.

  Marcial took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one without offering. His white hair seemed to glow. “I like your country,” he said, though I hadn’t told him where I was from. He blew smoke and stared into the street. “Fine contraband. Interesting climate. Lovely, generous women.”

  This entire time I’d been standing at the door of the hotel. I had the key in my hand and I could have left him at any moment.

  “You’re from the capital?” he asked.

  “Born and raised.”

  Marcial sighed. “There’s not a sadder, more detestable city in the world.”
<
br />   “You may be right,” I said.

  “Of course I am. Won’t you sit?”

  It was, in spite of the damp, a warm night.

  “Why sugarcoat it?” Marcial said, once I had joined him on the curb. “I need money.”

  “I don’t have money.”

  “Don’t you?” He flicked what was left of his cigarette into the street. “The port works all night, you know, twenty-four hours a day. It never closes. Everything brought into this cursed country comes through there. Have you read the papers? These are the good times! So much work, and still they won’t have me. Do you think I’m old?”

  I shook my head.

  My grandfather was the oldest person I’ve ever known. By the time I met Marcial he’d been dead for three years. I told Marcial how my grandfather had kept a girlie calendar in his workshop, hidden from my grandmother behind a more respectable one with pictures of our country’s various tourist attractions: those ruins with which we tempt the world. When I was a boy, he had me pencil in my birthday on the hidden calendar. Even then his memory was fading. “It’s in May,” he said, “isn’t it?” He held the calendar in his trembling hands and admired the woman. She was dark-skinned and leggy. My grandfather, I recall, held the calendar very close to his face; his eyes were no good. Then he passed it to me. “Go ahead, write it. And your name too.”

  “The problem is that my birthday is in March,” I told Marcial.

  He smiled. “But I forget things too.”