The King Is Always Above the People

by Daniel Alarcón

  It seems suddenly cruel to pretend he isn’t. He takes a deep breath.

  “Of course.”

  Cristina smiles and fans her papers on the table, X-rays and charts and diagrams and wrinkled, old prescriptions. “Pick one, any one,” she says, as if it were a card trick. “You know this game.”

  CHANGE

  By his second week at the Versailles, they have a new routine: on days when he’s scheduled to start early, Hernán walks with Clarisa into the center of town. They don’t hold hands as they stroll, and he’s grateful for this; content to walk alongside her, breathing in the clean, brisk smell of the damp city. He’s become accustomed to her; and she to him, he hopes. At times he thinks he might be happy, though he isn’t, of course, not really.

  The weather has shifted, the rains more frequent now, and every morning the sidewalks are slick. Pools of muddy water gather in the places where the cobblestone is broken. The street dogs shake off the wet, and commence their scavenging with more than the usual urgency. Down in the flats, where the rain has overwhelmed the sewers, the cars move slowly, bald tires breaking the oily skin of the water, spreading tiny wakes as they pass. The sun is dazzling, unexpected surfaces reflecting light, and at certain angles, the city seems to be made of silver. It’s all very beautiful, Hernán thinks, much more than he’d expected, or had a right to expect when he stepped on the night bus headed away from the capital.

  Usually Clarisa leaves him at the door of the restaurant, and walks the few blocks to the boutique on her own, but one morning, they’re lost in conversation when he realizes they’ve passed the Versailles, and are heading to the boutique instead. He feels a knot of panic in his chest. His two liaisons with Clarisa’s friends have left him unsettled. He looks for the women everywhere. He has no practical experience with infidelity, and his discomfort, he feels certain, will be visible to any and all. He was never very good at secrets.

  But when they get to the shop, Lena hasn’t come yet—relief! He can escape!—and while Clarisa rummages through her bag for her keys, Hernán does his best not to fidget. She’s in no rush, chatty and content, half an arm buried in a bag so oversize Hernán might, under slightly different circumstances, find it comical. It would be quicker to spill everything onto the sidewalk, he thinks. Finally, she declares that she must’ve left the keys at home.

  “So we wait,” she adds, in a voice that accepts no dissent. Hernán wants at all costs to leave before Lena arrives. He checks his watch, and is beginning to say that he must be going when suddenly—she’s there.

  “The famous Hernán!” Lena says. She’s wearing a blue dress and simple leather sandals. Her hair is just as it was when she walked in that day, pulled back tight, the same bloom of curls emerging from the ponytail, and in spite of himself, he’s searching for it, that tiny hairless spot hidden beneath.

  “Don’t be shy!” says Clarisa to Hernán.

  Both women chuckle.

  “It’s wonderful to meet you,” Lena says.

  He can feel himself blush. Clarisa makes the formal introductions, and they exchange a polite kiss on the cheek, Hernán suddenly demure, careful not to make actual contact with her skin. I’m panicking, he thinks, and feels shame wash over him. Surely Lena noticed that I didn’t kiss her; surely she took it as an insult.

  Back in the real world, a conversation is under way: “Clarisa tells me you have a new job.”

  “I do.”

  Hernán gazes down the street, squinting against the sun, which has made the blacktop a slick runway of pure light.

  “And?”

  Clarisa answers for him. “He hates it, naturally.”

  “I do?”

  “Of course you do, sweetie,” Clarisa says. “You’re not made for that sort of place. Terrible people there. Ordinary people.” She turns to Lena. “He’s a doctor, remember.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s right,” Lena says. She bites her lip. “Tell me, Hernán: What’s your specialty?”

  They laugh before he can answer. Hernán wonders why they’re so happy.

  TODAY’S THEME IS REGRET

  It’s true they were shaken when Aurelio ran away. Anyone would’ve been. But they quickly decided it had been an isolated incident, an anxiety-inducing but ultimately discrete moment that augured nothing. Everything went back to normal.

  The boy mostly cooperated. He continued hiding his toys beneath sofa cushions, behind doors, inside low cabinets around the apartment. He continued dancing down the hallway in his socks every morning, and spending an eternity selecting a stuffed animal to accompany him to preschool each day. (Every morning, Rabbit, Cow, and Fox were brought to the sofa, arranged like suspects to be interrogated or contestants in some kind of game show, summoned to argue their cases before the tiny boy-judge.)

  Every weekday morning, Hernán walked Aurelio to preschool, about ten blocks from the apartment, across the park and just beyond the avenue they’d nicknamed “the River,” for its constant flow of cars and buses, and because it was, in fact, named after the country’s longest river, a multisyllabic indigenous name the boy found difficult to pronounce. When it rained, the gutters swelled, channels of churning water forming at the sidewalk’s edge; these were Aurelio’s favorite days, when the imaginary river became a real one. On those occasions, Hernán had to pick the boy up and carry him across, so insistent was the child on his right to wade into the dark puddles and ruin his sneakers.

  They were crossing the River one morning, a few months after Aurelio’s brief disappearance, when the boy said, “This is where I wanted to come. That day. This is where I was headed.”

  “When?”

  “The day I ran away.”

  They still talked about it as “running away,” even though, strictly speaking, he’d never left the apartment. The panic of it came rushing back, and suddenly the traffic of the River felt impossibly dense. Hernán shut his eyes for a moment, the sun on his face. He felt the swirl of light behind his eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Why would you want to come here?”

  “Because it’s so loud,” the boy said. “If I’m here, I can just listen. I don’t think at all. I can just listen.”

  Hernán gripped Aurelio’s hand tightly. Until recently, maybe a year ago, he’d always lifted the boy when crossing the River. He was so afraid Aurelio might slip from his grasp, and drivers in this city were animals. It was Adri who’d finally put an end to it: no, she said, the boy was old enough to cross the street by himself. He had to learn to be more independent.

  “Why do you like it so loud?” Hernán asked.

  “So I don’t have to hear you fighting with Mami.”

  Fighting sounded so coarse. Hernán wouldn’t have used that word. If he was describing the conversation he was having with Adri that day, he might’ve said they were disagreeing loudly. He felt the blood rushing to his cheeks; the traffic slowed for a light, and they stepped into the River. Hernán knew he should say something—a word of assurance so the boy wouldn’t worry—but he was worried himself. He’d tell Adri about this, he resolved. He’d tell her what the boy had said, which was, in a way, good news. If we can fix this, he won’t run away again. So easy! He’d tell her, and they’d promise things would get better, for Aurelio, for themselves.

  But he didn’t get the chance. That night his evening class ran late, and by the time he made it home, Adri and Aurelio were asleep. It was just as well. He was tired too.

  ANOTHER MAN’S MONEY

  At the end of each week, he brings his paycheck home to Clarisa, though she hasn’t asked for it. She accepts it without comment.

  Clarisa’s husband, Josué, sends letters twice a month, penned in a shaky script only she can decipher. She reads them aloud to Hernán sometimes, as if to remind him she is not the kind of woman her liaisons might imply. Occasionally the sailor strikes upon a nice turn of phrase, a poetic description of h
is work, or a sentence that evokes something of the loneliness one must confront when there is nothing for the eye to seize upon but endless water. Part of Hernán is even jealous. The wandering husband wires money whenever he arrives in port, not much, but the modest amounts do allow Hernán and Clarisa certain comforts. For her part, Clarisa never complains about working. The hours pass quickly at the boutique, she tells Hernán. She and Lena have been friends since they were girls. Most of the customers are friends too, women with whom Clarisa says she has no secrets.

  Hernán says nothing, though he feels certain this isn’t true.

  He makes a point of taking early shifts, so as to avoid the complication of running into Lena. Instead he leaves just as the sun is rising, when Clarisa is still asleep, and one morning his legs feel heavy, so he decides to take the bus into the center of town. This is hardly a time-saving proposition, Hernán realizes as the bus climbs farther and farther into the hills, carving a byzantine route away from the center of the city. The bus finally makes it to the ridge, and the bay is spread out before them, wide and gleaming, the city center visible too, a handful of buildings rising above the rest, more lovely at this distance than they are up close. The bus speeds along now, slowing occasionally to pick up a few students, or a maid in her pristine white uniform, or a working man, heading to the port with a cheap newspaper under his arm. “Right foot, right foot,” the driver mutters when Hernán is getting off, but the advice doesn’t register. He steps with his left from the moving bus, and just like that, his ankle twists, and pain shrieks up his leg.

  He limps the rest of the way to the restaurant.

  That afternoon, when the Versailles has emptied, Hernán takes a cab to the house he has come to think of as his home. In the backseat, he pulls up his pant leg and examines his ankle; what he finds is a swirl of purple and blue, shades of a stormy sea, a blending of colors he might consider beautiful were it not for the pain. He takes a deep breath, and directs the driver to Clarisa’s house. There, he pulls himself gingerly from the car, and once inside, he takes four aspirin and two glasses of whiskey before limping to bed. Clarisa finds him there, a few hours later, sleeping with his shirt off and his mouth agape.

  He tells her everything.

  “You poor thing,” Clarisa murmurs. She’s wearing a white dress—the one she wore when they first met—and drifts in and out of the room with the grace of a dancer. “I’m listening,” she calls as she flits through the small house, and it’s the first time he’s complained about work to her. She brings him another drink, and sits by his bedside, placing a gentle hand over his eyes. She lays a bag of ice on his ankle. Then she tells him to quit the Versailles.

  “What about money?”

  She shrugs, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to her. “We have money.”

  Her blithe use of the plural pronoun is startling.

  “His money, you mean.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Quit,” she says again. “Make a scene. I want to see you do it. What’s his name? Your manager?”

  “Holden.”

  “Hurt him.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “I know everyone in this fucking town,” she says. “And I hate them all.”

  It’s impossible to argue with her.

  Clarisa smiles. The light is low, and she takes a deep breath. “Now,” she says, “pretend you are very ill. Pretend you’ve washed up in some faraway hospital, a shell of a man.”

  It’s what he’s been doing for hours.

  Clarisa wraps a bandage around his head, covering his eyes, and tears the pants off him. His ankle throbs, but she removes the ice. “Listen,” she says. “There’s no pain anymore. Only silence. It’s the end of the war.”

  “Which war?”

  “Any war. It was terrible. It was bloody. You saw awful things. Men decapitated. Entire villages burned. Your heart is broken, but you survived, only you can’t think of any reason why this should be taken as good news. You and your men are holed up near the northern border.”

  “I’m a lieutenant?”

  “Sure. Or a colonel, or whatever is higher. You’re in charge. There are refugees crowding the roads to the capital, leaving with whatever they can carry, and walking south. Everyone fleeing. Maybe a peace has been signed, maybe it hasn’t. There’s been no news for weeks, only the steady rumble of artillery fire, and planes sailing overhead.”

  “Planes!”

  “You’ve been told to stay and fight to the last man, but in your heart of hearts, you don’t want to die just yet. You see the faces of your soldiers, their tired, ragged faces, and think, ‘This is just too much.’ They’re children. Conscripts from poor northern villages, a bunch of ignorant, illiterate teenagers who’ve never lived. Probably all virgins. They’ve never seen a map in their entire lives, and have no idea why they’re fighting. An enemy attack is imminent. Your supply lines are weak. You stay up all night, praying, and then you make your decision. You don’t want their deaths on your conscience. For what? This war is stupid. You will be vilified, called a deserter and worse. You know it, but you don’t care. The next morning, you order your men to break camp. ‘We’re going south,’ you say. ‘We’re retreating?’ the soldiers ask. ‘We can’t do that.’ You shake your head. You clarify—‘We’re not retreating, we’re going south.’ ‘But we can’t,’ they say.”

  “They don’t want to go?”

  “Of course not. They’re young and they’re foolish and they don’t know the first thing about death.”

  “And I do.”

  “Sure you do. Your wife and child were killed in a bombing raid.”

  “They were,” Hernán says, his voice just above a whisper.

  “As far as you’re concerned, you’re already dead. It’s all the same to you. It was these young boys you were thinking of, but if they want to stay and die, who are you to stop them? ‘We’ll stay,’ you announce. They raise a cheer. A reckless, suicidal cheer. Then the attack comes, and it’s worse than you thought. Wave after wave of bombing, thousands of enemy soldiers, hordes of them, pouring over the horizon thick as ants, and these children around you, these lightly armed boys, they step in front of bullets, as they were trained to do, and die one after another, and all you can think of is your son.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Young. Ten or eleven. He wrote you letters about what he was learning in school. About a blond-haired girl he liked. About a Ferris wheel set up at the edge of town, how his mother wouldn’t let him ride it. Dangerous, she said. And then the letters stopped coming. No one had to tell you what happened. And in the battle, you think of these letters, and your son, and you order your men to lay down their arms. ‘Give up, damn it!’ you scream. There’s no point anymore. This time, the ones who’ve survived, they’re afraid, and they listen to you, of course. The battlefield is strewn with the bodies of their comrades. All these lives you could’ve saved, the dead who perished with their eyes open, dreaming of glory. You are taken prisoner. And though you have no injuries, you are unable to move. Unable to speak. Bedridden. You stare at the wall all day long. The enemy thinks you’re faking, but it’s not that at all. You have injuries no one can see.”

  “They think I’m a coward.”

  “But I don’t.”

  “And who are you?”

  “I’m an enemy nurse with a young boy, and I hate the war. I’ve lost my husband. You remind me of him. You’re the same age. I wouldn’t understand your language, even if you spoke. But I think you’re beautiful.”

  “Really?” Hernán feels her nails tracing lines on the insides of his legs. “And so?”

  “So,” Clarisa says. “I decide to cure you.”

  THE BATTLE

  Clarisa arranges to be at the Versailles the next day, so she can see him quit. She’s made him promise a
show, and he has, though he’s not really certain what that means. He’s dressing in the break room, when another busser says that Holden wants to see him.

  Holden has a tiny office in the back, with a grease-stained window facing the kitchen. He’s examining a ledger when Hernán walks in. He doesn’t say anything, just looks up with his little eyes, tapping his fingers against the desk. He probably sleeps back here, Hernán thinks.

  “Are you all right?” Holden asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  Holden sighs. “You were slow yesterday. A few customers complained.”

  The office wall is cluttered with cheaply framed photos of local soccer teams, parade floats, and the like. There is one image of a sinking ship, tilting hopelessly toward the sky, and another of a family on a pier, with the same ship in the distance, its nose nearly perpendicular to the horizon. It is a windy day. Everyone is cheerful, pointing at the disaster and smiling, except the father, who wears dark glasses and a stern impression that could be Holden’s.

  “Your family?” Hernán asks, nodding at the picture.

  Holden softens, offering a smile so unexpected, so obscure, Hernán is briefly alarmed.

  “They were here when I took over. Thirty-two years ago.” He pauses. “My sons are grown now. Those aren’t them, but I guess I never took the pictures down.”

  Hernán is waiting for more, but the manager shrugs. That’s all there is, so Hernán lifts up his left leg, resting his heel on the desk. He pulls up the fabric of his pressed gray pants to reveal the splotchy skin around his ankle. “I couldn’t walk. Barely stand.”

  Holden nods. “I see. And today?”

  “Better.”

  “Can you work?”

  Hernán wonders for a moment if he’s being sent home, today of all days. “Yes,” he says.

  “Okay. So do your best.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your best,” the manager says. “That’s all. Maybe it’ll be a quiet day. Anything else?”