The King Is Always Above the People

by Daniel Alarcón

  A scruffy red-haired mutt appeared from under a park bench, padding lazily through the fog. He came right up to us, not growling, not afraid. Marcial took a wine cork from his pocket and held it out. The dog ventured closer, and licked the reddish end of the cork happily, like a lollipop. Marcial petted the dog with his other hand.

  “You really must see the port at night. It’s something else,” Marcial said. “With all the lights, it looks like noon there. I can take you. I know the way.”

  “No, thank you,” I said. Of course, every road in town led to the port, but it didn’t seem right to tell him that.

  He scowled. “You people have no appreciation. It’s why you’re so backward.”

  And with that, it was time to go. I was about to stand when Marcial stopped me. “Wait,” he said, and I did. He shooed the dog away, as if he suddenly wanted privacy. He gave it a soft push, and when it resisted, he tossed the red wine cork down the street. The dog went off after it. He put his left hand on my shoulder, smiled, then showed me his right: it was a fist, and in it Marcial held a knife. It wasn’t a long blade. He frowned. “You see, I was hoping to rob you this evening.”

  —

  THAT NIGHT I DREAMED of her and woke in a panic. The next night I was in a different hotel, in a different town farther down the coast—the same dream. By the fourth night, I had come to distrust myself, and was barely sleeping. I was thirsty all the time. I finished the book I’d been reading and left it on the table at a coffee shop at a border town. I was halfway down the block when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was the pretty waitress from the café. She was out of breath and there was a wonderful pink to her cheeks. “You forgot your book,” she said.

  “I left it on purpose.”

  She bit her lip. Somehow I’d made her nervous. “But you can’t do that,” she said.

  And so I took it with me. Five days later, I was home. I still hadn’t slept, and it took the last of my strength to open the windows of the shuttered apartment. These were the abandoned rooms where I had been raised. The entire family had filtered north, then my wife and I came back to live out the last days of our marriage. There was hardly any furniture left—little by little our neighbors had raided the place. When my father first complained, we attributed it to his dementia, but it turned out he was right. Now it had gotten out of control. The creaky chair where my wife and I had made love was gone. The sofa too had disappeared, and the wall clock, and the leather table in the foyer. I made a quick inventory: the china was missing, my mother’s nice flatware, a silver picture frame, half the books. My grandfather’s old tube radio was nowhere to be found, and there was a dish towel moldering where the television had once sat.

  But what did I care? I emptied my bag on the floor of the living room, shook its contents out, and observed with some satisfaction the accumulated mound of wrinkled clothes and paper and trinkets: train tickets, matchbooks, the knife I had taken from Marcial that night. The book was there too, adorned with its photograph of a Parisian woman with dark hair and dark eyes. It was summer and the setting sun poured in and stained the walls red. I could smell the ocean. Everyone knew I was back. I had sent postcards at every stop along the way, keeping the family apprised of my southern progress, and so I waited, watching the daylight fade, for someone to call. They were about to call; I was certain of it. There were, I assumed, still friends and family in this city of mine. I fell asleep on the wooden floor, waiting. When I awoke it was night, the apartment was dark and cool, and the phone hadn’t disturbed my rest. I turned on every light in the old apartment and spent a furious half hour looking for it, tearing through what remained of our things, opening every drawer, every closet. The phone, the phone—our neighbors had taken it too.

  THE AURORAS

  DARKNESS ON ALL SIDES

  It’s early March when Hernán arrives in the port city. He’s out of his element, just as he hoped he’d be, 2,700 kilometers from home. Everything he’s brought with him fits in a duffel bag. The university has granted him a one-year leave. Adri has done the same, though she was more open-ended. It is clear that neither really expects him to return.

  There is no bus terminal really, just a gravel parking lot at the edge of downtown. Hernán walks the long way into the city, through the narrow, hilly streets. It isn’t far, nor is he in a rush. He’s heading to the port to look for work, when a door opens. A woman steps from her brightly painted house, wearing a simple dress, so white it glows. Her black hair is pulled back tight. She has a lovely smile, a lovely figure, and stands against a wall as green as the sea, watching him with hands knotted behind her, knowing that she is being admired.

  “Excuse me,” she says, and this is the story she tells: there’s a large pot on an upper shelf that she cannot reach, and she needs it urgently for a dish she’s preparing. Hernán is very careful not to smile. It’s like a dream he had once. He glances quickly up and down the street. So does she. It’s the dead hour just after lunch, and no one else is around.

  Hernán drops his duffel by the sofa, and she closes the door behind them. Without a word, she leads him to the kitchen, where there are, in fact, cooking implements on the cramped counter—a cutting board, a knife, four peeled potatoes waiting to be sliced. A pot of water boils languidly on the stove, and various drawers are open. A few flies orbit a rump of beef.

  “What are you making?”

  “A stew,” the woman says. “It will be very tasty.”

  She fetches Hernán a stepladder, and when he has climbed onto it, reaching blindly to the very top of a cabinet—who would think to hide a pot so high?—he feels her hands on his thighs. He looks down.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman says. “I was afraid you might fall.” She doesn’t take her hands away, but bites her lip instead. Her eyelids flutter.

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “At sea. For another six months. He just wrote me.”

  Her name is Clarisa, she tells him. Years later, a decade from now and even longer, those three syllables will recall for him the shock of this moment, when he stands above her, admiring from this height the curve of her face, the glow of her skin—when he realizes, by the quality of the light streaming in through the window above the sink, that there is much yet to be lived before this day is through.

  “It’s a beautiful name,” Hernán says.

  She nods, and then, very slowly, she smiles. “Isn’t it?”

  A few hours later, he carries his duffel into the bedroom, where the two of them sit, naked, and unpack the few things he has brought with him from his former life. Clarisa empties a drawer for his pants and socks, lays his shirts on the bed and pushes the wrinkles away with the flats of her hands.

  “Normally, I wouldn’t do this,” she says after she has put away his clothes. “But I like you.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Under normal circumstances, I’d send you right back out to the street.”

  “And under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t stay.”

  “But?” Clarisa asks.

  He decides to tell the truth: “I have nowhere to go.”

  That evening, after they’ve eaten, the dishes rinsed and put away, she asks him where he has come from, and why he is wandering the world alone when he is no longer young. He doesn’t answer right away, but wonders how she knows he no longer thinks of himself as young, when only a few weeks before, he had. There is a great deal that he does not want to tell, not now, perhaps not ever.

  Clarisa stands and draws the thick curtains so that the room is almost completely dark. She sits back on the bed, but on top of the covers, and there is none of her that touches him. Hernán can tell she will only be satisfied by something that sounds like truth.

  He puts his hands on his chest. He closes his eyes, opens them, and there is no difference—darkness binds him on all sides. He takes a deep breath.

  APPETIT
ES

  When he wakes the next morning, Clarisa gives him keys to the front door and a map. She draws two X’s on the map, one for the house, and one for the boutique where she works, a tiny store she co-owns with her friend Lena, where they sell dresses and makeup and overpriced jewelry. “Have fun,” she says, and gives Hernán a kiss on the forehead.

  He spends the day walking through the sun-splashed streets. If the port town had seen better days, it was nonetheless decaying with a certain dignity. He admires the colorful, crumbling houses, decorated with strips of brightly painted corrugated metal, edges rusting. A sagging clothesline is strung between two apartment blocks, fluttering in the breeze, hanging so low a pant leg brushes him casually along the top of his head as he passes beneath it. He comes upon a pack of teenagers, a gothic, sad-looking bunch, black hair combed down over their eyes, their ears invisible beneath oversize headphones. A boy asks him for cigarettes as he passes—not a cigarette, but many, plural—not a hint of innocence in his eyes. Hernán feels very old. He turns to see a woman boarding a bus, carrying her grim, white-haired dog wrapped in a blanket. While she fishes in her pocket for change, she hands the dog to the driver, who accepts the animal without comment.

  From certain street corners, Hernán can appreciate the vastness of the sea, so immense it takes his breath away.

  Adri and Hernán met when her son, Aurelio, only three at the time, darted away from his mother in the crowded university dining hall and crashed directly into Hernán, who lost his balance and spilled his tray. In spite of everything that had happened since, recalling the story still made him smile. There was a loud crash, and the cafeteria fell momentarily silent. Then: a wailing child, a panicked mother racing to find her boy. Aurelio wasn’t hurt, only a little spooked by the collision. Adri was apologetic, but also noticed (couldn’t help but notice) the tender way Hernán knelt down to comfort the child, paying no attention to the yogurt and orange juice splattered across his pants and shirt. Her son gazed at this stranger with big, trusting eyes, and in a moment, even before Adri had a chance to comfort him, Aurelio was calm. The bustle of the cafeteria resumed. She offered to replace Hernán’s late breakfast, which he chivalrously declined. They ended up eating together anyway.

  Now, far away in the port city, Hernán buys a lunch from a stand near the boardwalk, at the edge of a construction site. It’s midday and the sun beats down relentlessly; work has slowed. Hernán squints at the artist’s rendering of the finished building, regal and elegant, with no apparent relation to the confused cluster of rebar and concrete and wood scaffolding before him. It would require a poet’s imagination to intuit a livable structure from the current mess. At one end of the site lies a stack of giant sewer pipes, a dozen or so, and each has a pair of boots poking out from one end. The workers are resting.

  That night, when Clarisa returns, they make love, and then she bathes, and then they make love again, until her body is glistening with sweat, and then she falls asleep. “I’ve been alone too long,” she says, as if her desires require explanation or apology. “I’m not usually like this.”

  “I don’t mind,” he tells her.

  Clarisa has her routines, her customs, and soon she has accommodated him within her ordered world of appetites. If there’s nothing else around with which to organize his life, Hernán tells himself, this will do for the time being. After that first night, she never asks him anything—not where he has come from, not what he is fleeing, not what will happen tomorrow or the day after. At some point Clarisa’s husband will return, and Hernán will have to leave, but there’s no discussion of that now. He feels he has stumbled upon the perfect escape, or fallen prey to some extravagant hoax. When his guard is down, he lets slip a few things: that he taught at a university, for example. “The students called me ‘Doctor,’” he adds with a laugh. That he had a wife, and a son.

  Most everything else he holds tight. He never says their names aloud.

  BINGO

  On the fourth day, Hernán finally makes it to the port. To his great disappointment, he’s told they’re not hiring. The man who informs Hernán of this is not unkind. It’s true Hernán has no experience, that he’s never worked unloading a ship, but he has read Conrad and Melville and Mutis, has memorized long passages of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and knows that without the sea and its magnetic call, what we think of as Western civilization simply would not exist. He can’t help but feel disappointed, as if by denying him this work the man at the port has robbed him of his rightful inheritance.

  Back in the capital, his classes would be starting about now. He can picture crowded hallways and musty offices, the weary faces of his colleagues. Easiest to conjure are the disheveled students who would be traipsing into his classroom, wiping sleep from their eyes. They are young, privileged, and jaded, genetically engineered to be unimpressed by Hernán or anyone else over thirty. Still, very occasionally, he’d have a breakthrough. He recalls a lecture several years ago, on the relationship between the poetry of the 1930s and the rickety project of nation-building—he’d felt inspired that day, and a few of the students had responded with applause.

  With this muted strain of nostalgia swelling his chest, Hernán spends the afternoon looking for a bookstore. He asks a few passersby, and they each smile in that small-town way, either utterly charmed by his question or simply unable to comprehend it, and they point him in different directions—to a newspaper stand, to a stationery store, and finally to a shop at the dark end of an alley, where a ruddy-faced old man pulls the squeaking lever of a mimeograph machine without pause. A worn old fedora hangs from a nail above the light switch, and the old man welcomes Hernán with a nod, unsurprised and unmoved, as if he’d been expecting this visitor. He’s producing leaflets for a bingo tournament. On a table to his left, the day’s work thus far: a wedding invitation, business cards for a chess teacher, a sign advertising rooms for rent. There is no bookstore in this city, the old man says, unless you count the gift shop of the chapel, which, amid its rosary beads and postcards of obscure saints, also sells copies of the Bible, which is, strictly speaking, a book. “Isn’t it?”

  The air in the shop is dank, redolent with the pungent, inky smell that the old man has long ago made his peace with. For a moment, Hernán is overwhelmed by it, covers his mouth and nose with his sleeve, coughing into the crook of his elbow.

  “Sure,” Hernán says when he’s recovered. “The Bible is a fine book.”

  “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

  He shakes his head. How can he explain?

  “And where are you from?” the mimeographer asks.

  “The capital,” Hernán says, turning red suddenly, as if he has admitted something shameful.

  “The capital, the capital . . .” the old man says once and again, letting the words float around the room. “Never been there.”

  This he says with a hint of pride.

  And then, just like that, he goes back to work, the leaflets appearing one at a time, in an even rhythm, now another, and now another, and so on. His name is Julian, he says, and there’s no time to rest. Hernán thanks the old man. He takes the leaflet when it is offered, still warm from the mimeograph machine, and smiles at its blue, sticky ink, its promise of prosperity, implicit in the exclamation point: BINGO!

  Out in the street, Hernán’s eyes take a moment to adjust to the light. The sky has begun to shift, filling with purple rain clouds. He folds the scrap of paper into his back pocket, and makes his way back to Clarisa’s beneath the darkening sky.

  When he arrives, he finds a woman he’s never seen before standing in the doorway.

  “You must be Hernán,” she says.

  He nods, because he can’t quite think of what else to do.

  “It’s going to rain soon,” she says.

  In his pocket, he fingers the keys Clarisa gave him. This time he doesn’t answer.

  “I’m
Lena,” she tells him. “Clarisa’s friend from the boutique. You’re not going to leave me outside in the rain, are you?”

  Hernán unlocks the door, and she saunters in, dropping her coat over the back of an armchair before she finds a seat on the sofa. Each of her movements is careful, deliberate, but the sofa doesn’t comply with her stagecraft: it’s old, gone terribly soft, and she sinks into it like quicksand. “Oh,” she says as her feet briefly float above the floor, inelegantly pedaling the air. She rights herself on the unsteady cushion, smiles, and asks for hot tea.

  All this happens before Hernán has closed the door.

  Hernán sets the water to boil, and when the tea is ready, he joins her. She wears her hair pulled back tightly, the ponytail exploding into a rather unruly knot of curls, her skin the color of milk. She warms her hands against the teacup, bringing it so close to her face that her eyeglasses steam up. She takes them off, lays them on the corner table, and flashes an embarrassed smile, saying nothing.

  “Do you live nearby?” Hernán asks.

  “Not really.

  “Did the shop close early?”

  “No,” Lena says, after a moment, as though the question required a certain amount of thought. Then: “You’re from the capital?”

  Hernán nods, sensing she has a question for him but is embarrassed to ask. When she says nothing, he offers: “Have you been there?”

  “Sure,” she says. “Well, not really.”

  “Which is it?”

  She coughs into her hands. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  It doesn’t, he admits, and then they’re quiet for a moment. The rains begin, just a pitter-patter on the roof for now.

  “Tell me,” she says finally, “do you like my teeth?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “My teeth. Do you like them?”

  Lena spreads her mouth wide open, as if yawning, and bares her gums. Hernán peers into her mouth, taking note of a very ordinary set of teeth. She bites down, and then wiggles her jaw from side to side.