Lost City Radio

by Daniel Alarcón

  “He’s not here,” Norma whispered to Elmer.

  The sun buried them in white light, and the shots continued steady, rhythmic. Melodies drifted skywards.

  “Just one, sir?” the soldier said.

  Rosquelles frowned wearily. He took Elmer’s notepad from his hands. “I’m going to have to hold on to this,” he said. “You understand.”

  Elmer said nothing. He reached for Norma’s hand, and she let him hold it. She stepped closer to him.

  “Show me the lists,” Norma said to Rosquelles. “Please.”

  “What was the name? The one you’re looking for.”

  She told him.

  Rosquelles raised an eyebrow. “Never heard of him. Did he go by any other names?”

  She bit her lip. “I don’t know.”

  “How do you expect to find an answer if you don’t ask the right questions?” Rosquelles sighed. “It was a big war, madam. A very big war with many, many players.”

  “Sir?” the soldier asked again.

  The official nodded with a smile. “Oh, to be young and brainless again!”

  Then there was a shot, and a man collapsed: third row, second from the back, so that most of the prisoners didn’t see him fall. They sang, looking straight ahead. The downed man had been hit in the stomach. He slumped to his knees and tumbled forward, prostrate in the dust. His burnt-copper back arched, his arms buried beneath him. He was praying. Norma was too: her fingers curled tightly around the chain links, her nails digging into her palms. Rey wasn’t coming back.

  SHE SLEPT with the door open every night. At one time, when she was more hopeful, she had thought: if Rey were to come back tonight, he would see right away that I am sleeping alone. That had been the logic at first, but now it wouldn’t be truthful to say that she expected anything of the sort. It was habit, pure and simple, of the kind whose origin was vaguely recalled but which existed nonetheless, a constant and unchanging fact of life. Her door was open.

  But this night, the boy had come. He was there, resting on the couch. The apartment was small: from the living room, one could see through to the kitchen and into the bedroom. It wasn’t exactly self-consciousness that Norma felt; it was an awareness, sudden and stark, of her solitude. It wasn’t the boy. Victor said little. He was a tangle of emotions and wide-eyed observations buried beneath a rigid silence. She didn’t know what he had seen, but it had rendered him nearly mute. He was small, thin-boned, and there was nothing at all imposing about him. She guessed he would be as content to sleep on the cool tiled floor of the kitchen as on the soft, pillowed couch. But he was there. She could have hidden his frail body in a cabinet under the sink, and still she would feel his presence. It wasn’t him: it was his breath, his humanness, so close to her in the apartment. In the space that had been hers and Rey’s, that had then been only hers. A sealed place, an impregnable store of memories where time had stopped for nearly a decade. Visitors? She could count them on her fingers. Without Rey, she had lived like this: spectacularly alone.

  Victor slept on the couch, breathing softly in the humming blue light of the pharmacy. The blanket covered nearly all of him, except his feet, and these stuck out, his toes curling and straightening as he dreamed. The place was too small. They’d always meant to move to a bigger apartment when they had children, and they’d tried. She was thirty-two when Rey disappeared. They’d never stopped trying. On their last night together, they’d tried. The doctors had said there was nothing wrong with her, that he was in perfect shape, that these things took time. So time passed. When Norma and Rey were married, they’d daydreamed of a gaggle of children, a half dozen, each more beautiful than the last, each a more perfect representation of their love. His hazel eyes, his hair curling skywards. Her delicate hands, long, stately fingers. Her aquiline nose—not his that crooked slightly to the left—but Rey’s skin tone, more suited to the sunny places where they would vacation once the war ended. They built variations of themselves, portraits of their unborn children, unique amalgams of their best features. My voice, Norma said, for speaking. No, Rey said, laughing: mine, for singing.

  They made love regularly and hopefully, just as the doctor prescribed. And nothing. Passionately and desperately—still nothing. When he didn’t return, Norma’s period didn’t come for ninety terrible days. She wrestled with the possibility of raising his child alone, almost allowing herself a glimmer of happiness—but it was only stress, her body as traumatized as her heart, shutting down, slowing very nearly to a standstill. She discovered in the mirror one day that she’d lost weight, that she was as spent, as ragged as the soldiers returning home from the countryside. All bone, gaunt and pale. She wasn’t pregnant: she was dying.

  Now the boy slept with his face buried in the cushions of the couch. Norma turned on the radio: softly, a melody, strings, a wistful voice. The boy did not stir. She edged the door closed, the blue light vanished. She was alone again, in darkness. She undressed.

  FOUR

  YEARS AGO, a lifetime ago, it went this way: on a moonless night, Rey and a few friends tossed back shots of grain alcohol and then tested their aim against the front wall of the school, rocks against brick and glass. They were drunk and alive, just boys playing a prank. But that same night, something else happened: a small, homemade bomb exploded inside the mayor’s office. This was the war’s prehistory, its unnatural birthing, more than a decade before the fighting would begin in earnest. It occurred in a distant town, in a country as yet unaccustomed to such things. The blast awoke a restless, confused crowd. Fire tore at the roof, and windows were blown into the street in neat, glowing shards. The men lined up with pails of water, but it was no use. The water ran out, or their resolve did, and so they stopped. The sky was black, a soft breeze blowing. The building smoldered. It was a beautiful night for a fire.

  Rey was only thirteen years old, but he would end up in jail that night, locked away for his own safety. Outside, a crowd would be calling for his head, gripped with the paranoia only a mob can feel. The jailer, his father’s brother Trini, would be preaching calm. Inside, Rey’s father, headmaster of the aggrieved school, would be red-faced and shouting, “What did you do, boy? What did you do?”

  THE TOWN’S jail was two blocks off the plaza, sharing a quiet side street with the humble homes of maids and stonemasons. The exterior of the building was a pale blue, adorned with a rudimentary painting of the national seal, which, if examined up close (as Rey often did), was as blurry and inexact as the pixilated photographs that ran on the front pages of the town’s only newspaper. An old Indian maxim—DON’T LIE, DON’T KILL, DON’T STEAL—was inscribed in severe black lettering above the door-jamb, perhaps giving the sleepy jail an import it didn’t deserve. Rey liked the jail: he liked to sit with his uncle, whose job, it seemed, consisted of waiting for trouble to manifest itself. According to Trini, there wasn’t enough of it. He complained bitterly about the quiet town, and liked to tell stories of his year in the capital. There was no way of knowing which were true and which were false. To hear Trini tell it, the city was peopled with thieves and louts and killers in equal parts. To hear Trini tell it, he’d been a one-man crime-fighting machine, justice patrolling the crooked streets, all grit and courage. The city! It was hard to imagine: a rotten, dying place, even then, crumbling and full of shadows. But what did it look like? Rey couldn’t picture it: the boiling, black ocean, the jagged coastline, the heavy clouds, the millions draped in perpetual dusk. Here, there was bright sun and real mountain peaks capped with snow. There was an azure sky and a meandering river and a cobblestone plaza with a trickling fountain. Lovers held hands on park benches, flowers bloomed in all the municipal flower beds, and the aroma of fresh bread filled the streets in the mornings. Rey’s hometown ended ten blocks from the plaza in any direction, giving way to dusty lanes and irrigated fields and small farmhouses with red-thatched roofs. Trini described a place Rey couldn’t imagine: a city of glamorous decay, a place of neon and diamonds, of guns and money, a place a
t once glittering and dirty. Everything here bored Rey’s uncle: the undulating countryside, the sharp teeth of the gray mountains, the scandalously blue sky. Most of all, the simple people, incapable of hatching plots against each other, or unwilling. Wholesome and therefore disappointing. “Why’d you come back, Uncle Trini?” Here Rey’s beloved uncle always fell silent, as if under a spell.

  “There was a woman,” he’d say, and trail off. He’d fiddle with the keys to his kingdom, that empty cell. “There’s always a woman.”

  Uncle Trini told stories and locked up the drunks that came in raving, the same ones who knew him by name, the ones who began all their confessions with the words: “I was minding my own business when…” It was part jail, part hostel for the hopeless drinkers, part psychiatric retreat for the colorful, if not criminal, elements of the town. And most nights, Rey rushed through his homework, walked the four blocks to the cramped little police station, and sat on the front step with his uncle. Together they waited for something to go wrong. The ordinary crimes of the countryside: purse-snatching was as common as the graceless theft of fruit from a market stall. Murders occurred twice each decade, usually the tragic finales to disputes over land, livestock, or women. The drunks. “Trini!” they’d protest when the sergeant brought them in, and Rey’s uncle, impassive, would throw up his hands and unhook the keys from his belt loop. “Welcome back!” he’d say and smile despite himself. “Trini,” the drunks would plead, but they knew it was no use, and Rey watched them hang their heads and stagger in, chastened. Later, after the sergeant left for the night, Trini would send Rey to the store for liquor, his nephew bounding through the empty streets to Mrs. Soria’s all-night bodega, where you had to knock a certain way—taptap tap tap tap—before she would open the window and show her wizened face, squinting in the dim light: Who’s there? It’s me, madam. It’s Rey. She’d hand him a bottle topped with a scrap of a plastic bag held tight by a rubber band, ah, the homemade stuff…Made in wooden vats and old bathtubs she kept in her courtyard, emitting odors her tenants grumbled about, the stuff that came out clear, stinking like poison, the stuff Trini drank, wincing, an involuntary spasm shutting his right eye. But Rey’s uncle was a magnanimous drunk. He described the warm sensation in his chest, liquor’s sweet embrace, described his mind under its influence as a tower built of loose, unmortared bricks, and he prattled on about the woman, the one who’d seduced him, whose ass was a most delicious thing, the one with blue eyes and a tiny scar on the side of her neck, which she covered with her curly, brown hair. She had ruined the city for him by getting pregnant. She’d sent her brothers after him. “They beat me, boy,” Trini said, still incredulous years later, “right in the middle of the street, in broad daylight. Me! A uniformed officer!” Rey listened, his uncle’s words losing their borders to drink, syllables bleeding into each other. And the drunks gathered at the rusty bars of the cell to listen, to offer their condolences, their slurred and pithy advice: leave her, forget her, drink. Rey and Trini smiled. Trini’s confessions, like those of his jailed charges, presupposed a circumstantial innocence, a helplessness, a purity of intent. He had a son—“I have a son,” Trini shouted at the sky—somewhere in the city he’d been chased out of. After a few hours, Trini let his nephew take a shot—a small one—or pour a little in a plastic cup for the locked-up drunks, who had been stirred by the ammoniac smell of the stuff. Rey saw that the captives loved him in those moments. They took the drink with the reverence of the devout accepting Eucharist. He made them promise to be good. Rey made them swear. “Trini,” they called out, “tell your nephew to quit torturing us.” They drank, and the hours passed like this, until it was early morning. Rey’s head spun, and he played with the radio until he got a scratchy signal, news from the capital or old Cuban songs or a show of weather predictions for Indian farmers. Eventually, everyone fell asleep, woozy, in their assigned places: the drunks on the cool floor of the cell, Rey and his uncle on the steps of the jail, the sky creeping toward orange, and day already breaking on the other side of the mountains.

  And then, when he was thirteen, there was an explosion at the mayor’s office, and, on the same night: the windows, the stones, the school. Rey and his friends had donned bandannas to cover their faces, nascent guerrilla tactics, like in the papers that came from the capital. Just that week, an arrest had been made, a man caught in a house full of weapons. He would spend a few years in prison, take advantage of an amnesty, and be released. Later, he would consolidate five disparate factions and form the IL, but no one knew that then. It had been big news in Rey’s town, because the arrested man had spent part of his formative years there, before moving to the capital.

  But really, who could worry about such things: wasn’t there always someone trying to start a war in this country?

  Under cover of night, Rey and his friends set out to prowl the streets. Stray dogs, here and there a bum resting in a doorway, the town asleep, the four boys raced down alleys. Rey and three friends—“Who? Which ones?” his father asked later on, but Rey wouldn’t say. It didn’t seem right to give them up. The town at the hour had seemed abandoned. It was easy to imagine that you owned it: every corner, every low-slung house, every park and park bench. The steps of the cathedral, the palm trees that listed gently west, the fields at the edge of town where the hungry mice scurried and stole grain. The whole of it—yours. It was easy to imagine you were the only ones in the streets, but you were wrong.

  The school. There were no watchmen, only a wrought-iron fence held together with an ancient padlock. Easy to climb over. Later, “What did you do,” his father asked him, “and why?” Rey’s arms were bruised where the crowd had gotten hold of him, the tight clasping of hands and fists.

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Anything?”

  Rey choked on a cough. Outside, the crowd clamored for justice. “I didn’t do that,” he clarified.

  “Explain,” his father commanded.

  So he did: the boredom that had led to setting small fires in the field behind the clinic, the flames that had cast orange shadows over the gravelly earth, the smooth stones that had glowed in the firelight, and then, the target shining and obvious, calling them from the other side of town. The evening was clear and cool. It felt good to run with a pocketful of rocks. They stopped at Mrs. Soria’s bodega—taptap tap tap tap—with coins they’d pooled together, and the liquor burned but they choked it down, closing their eyes as they swallowed, everything emerging jagged and blurry. “Why?” his father asked again, but Rey couldn’t come to any conclusions about his own motives. He looked his father in the eye, a thirteen-year-old, still not sober three hours after his last swig, and felt something approximating pity, his father’s black eyes like pools of oil, his father’s graying hair, his face creased with disappointment, not a bad man, at least not at home. At school, he was a tyrant, of course, but in this sense, he was normal, no better or worse than any other headmaster. And Rey didn’t hate school, at least not with the passion that his friends did.

  “I don’t know,” Rey said. Is it possible to confess without acknowledging blame?

  The fact was, he shouldn’t have been caught at all. Rocks thrown at the school building on any other night? Harmless. A few windows shattered. What might have happened? Would anyone have thought to blame the son of the headmaster? There were dozens of poor kids from poor families, children with ashy knees and grim faces, who would have been blamed first. No one saw Rey. An elderly neighbor claimed to have spied four boys, but they were just shadows, laughing and carrying on. They could have been anybody. Then there was a flash of light and the boom: this changed everything. The explosion brought the army into town the next day. They came with guns, determined to find a culprit.

  These things would come later, and still, that night, there was no reason to get caught. Rey and his friends raced to the plaza to see it. Curiosity, nothing more. His friends had disappeared into the crowd, hadn’t they? Hadn’t they drunk as well, weren�
�t they in awe of the fire and as full of adrenaline? Why did you throw rocks at the school (in the end a meaningless crime, something that might have gone unnoticed on any other night), his father asked, but just as logically he could have said: Son, how did you turn the town against you? Why did you bring this all on yourself? On us?

  Something important had happened. Rey knew it at once. The mayor’s office was a small building, and when he arrived in the plaza, it seemed ready to collapse. Flame clung to the wooden roof beams. Glass had melted into yellow and red shapes, transfigured. Burning papers, burning chairs. Someone ran to tell the mayor. A plume of smoke curled into the sky, and there was heat. Everything had the air of urgency, of that long-wished-for, long-awaited trouble. And Rey was still drunk. He felt it in his breathing, in the strange glare of the fire. He felt shy and self-conscious. The fire crackled, and then the roof beam fell in a shower of embers. Smoke. The crowd gasped. Rey pulled his handkerchief up once again, resolved to find Trini, to share the excitement of this moment. His friends were gone, dispersed and disappeared, and Rey felt invisible at the peripheries of the crowd, but he was not. It took only a few moments for him to be spotted: ambling about unsteadily in the shadows of the plaza, wild-eyed, a dark bandanna covering his mouth and nose. As if terrorists dress this way! As if there were a uniform! But there he was, at the edge of the scene, looking very much the part.