The King Is Always Above the People

by Daniel Alarcón

  “We’re doing well today, no?” the blind man said. He didn’t wait for an answer, just smiled and hummed a tune.

  Then the light changed, and the boy gathered himself and led the blind man again through the idling rows of traffic. The air was sweet with exhaust. A man driving alone dropped money into the tin. Maico stopped short. He turned to the blind man, faced him.

  “What are you doing?” the blind man asked.

  It wasn’t a question that Maico could have answered, even if he’d tried. There was no question of trying. Maico reached into his pocket, pulled out the money they’d earned that morning, the money they’d been given, and dropped a handful into the blind man’s tin, where it rattled wonderfully, heavily, falling with such abrupt weight that the blind man nearly let go. He said, “What’s wrong with you, boy?” but Maico was not listening, could hear nothing but the sound of the revving motors, and he watched in the glare for the light to change; another handful of coins, little ten-cent pieces, the bigger silver coins that really meant something—all of it Maico dropped into the tin. He read the confusion on the blind man’s face. The money was all gone now; he had none of it, and he began to step back and away from the blind man.

  “Where are you going? Where are you?” the blind man said, not pleading but not unconcerned.

  Maico steeled himself, and with a swift slap he upended the blind man’s tin, knocking it and the coins from the beggar’s hands and into the street. Some rolled under the idling cars, others nestled into the cracks in the pavement, and a few caught a glint of sun and shone and shone. But only for the boy.

  A moment later, the light had changed, and the traffic had resumed its northward progress. But even if it had not, even if every car in the city had waited patiently for the blind man to drop to his knees and pick up each of the coins, Maico would have seen something that made it all worthwhile. It was what the boy would remember, what he would replay in his mind as he walked away, across the bridge, and up the long hill toward home. The blind man, suddenly helpless—for a moment, he was not pretending.

  THE BRIDGE

  TWO DAYS AGO, at approximately three forty-five Thursday morning, a truck driver named Gregorio Rabassa misjudged the clearance beneath the pedestrian overpass on the thirty-second block of Avenida Cahuide. His truck, packed with washing machines and destined for a warehouse not far from there, hit the bottom of the bridge, sheering the top off his trailer and bringing part of the overpass down onto the avenue below. The back of the trailer opened on impact, spilling the appliances into the street. Fortunately, at the time of the accident there were no other cars on that stretch of road, and Mr. Rabassa was not seriously injured. Emergency crews arrived within the hour, flooding Cahuide with light, and set about clearing the road of debris. Scraps of metal, pieces of concrete, the exploded insides of a few washing machines, all of it was loaded and carted away. Except for the ruined bridge, little evidence remained of the accident by the morning rush, and many people who lived nearby didn’t even hear what happened while they slept.

  The neighborhood to the east of Cahuide does not have one name, but many, depending on whom you ask. It is known most commonly as The Thousands, though many locals call it Venice, because of its tendency to flood. I’ve heard it referred to in news reports as Santa María, and indeed, it does border that populous district, but the name is not exactly correct. A few summers ago, after a wave of kidnappings, police dotted the area with checkpoints and roadblocks, and the neighborhood became known as Gaza, an odd, rather inexact reference to troubles on the other side of the world, only briefly and occasionally noted in the local press. How this nickname stuck is a mystery. The Thousands is an ordinary neighborhood of working poor, crammed with modest brick houses lining narrow streets. It is set in the foggy basin between two hills, and the only people who know it well are those who call it home. A turbid, slow-moving creek runs roughly parallel to Cahuide, and is partially canalized, a project intended to alleviate the annual flooding, but which has had, I am told, the opposite effect. The main road entering the neighborhood is paved, as are most others, but some are not. My uncle Ramón, who was blind, lived there with his wife, Matilde, who was also blind, and their road, for instance, was not paved.

  On Thursday morning, my uncle and his wife left their house early, as they always did; drank tea; and chatted briefly with Señora Carlotta, who sells emollients and pastries from a cart at the corner of José Olaya and Avenida Unidad. She tells me they were in good spirits, that they held hands as they left, though she can’t recall what it was they spoke about. “Nothing really,” she said to me this afternoon when I went to visit. Her broad face and graying hair give the impression of someone who has seen a great deal from her perch at the corner of these two rather quiet neighborhood streets. Her cheeks were wet and glistening as she spoke. “We never talked about anything in particular,” she said, “but I always looked forward to their visit. They seemed to be very much in love.”

  Each working day, after drinking their tea and chatting with Carlotta, my blind uncle and his blind wife boarded the 73 bus to the city center, a long meandering route that took over an hour, but that left them within a few steps of their work. They were both employed as interpreters by a company whose offices are not far from the judicial building where I work: Ramón specialized in English to Spanish; Matilde, Italian to Spanish. All sorts of people are willing to pay for the service, and the work could be, from time to time, quite interesting. They would spend their days on the phone, transparent participants in bilingual conversations, translating back and forth between businessmen, government officials, or old couples in one country speaking to their grandchildren in another. Those cases are the most taxing, as the misunderstandings between two generations are far more complex than a simple matter of language.

  I went to visit the offices yesterday on my lunch hour, to clean out their desks and talk to their colleagues. I have been named executor of their estate, and these sorts of tasks are my responsibility now. Everyone had heard about the accident, of course, and seemed stunned by the news. I received condolences in eight languages from an array of disheveled, poorly dressed men and women, who collectively gave the impression of hovering just slightly above what is commonly known as reality. Each interpreter wore an earpiece and a microphone, and seemed to have acquired, over the course of a career, or a lifetime, a greenish tint like that of the computer screen that sat before him. All around, the chatter was steady and oddly calming, like the sea, or an orchestra tuning up. One by one, the interpreters approached, shared a few hushed, accented words, all in a strange patois that seemed both related to and completely divorced from the local dialect. I had to strain to make out their words, and everything would end with an embrace, after which they would shuffle back to their desks, still lilting under their breath in a barely identifiable foreign language.

  Eventually, an elderly gentleman surnamed Del Piero, who had worked in the Italian section with Matilde, pulled me aside, and led me to a bank of ashy windows that looked out over a crowded side street. He was bent, had a thin, airy voice, and his breath smelled strongly of coffee. His sweater was old and worn, and looked as if you could pull a loose strand of yarn and unravel the entire garment. Mercifully, he spoke a clear, only slightly accented Spanish. They had worked together for years. He thought of Matilde as his daughter, Del Piero told me, and he would miss her most of all. “More than any of these other people,” he said, indicating the open floor of the translation offices with a disappointed nod. Did I hear him? He wanted to know if I could hear him.

  “Yes,” I said. “I hear you.”

  “She was a saint, a miracle of a woman.”

  I squeezed his arm, and thanked him for his kind words. “My uncle?” I asked.

  “I knew him too.” Del Piero shrugged me off, and straightened his sweater. “We never got along,” he said. “I don’t speak English.”

  I let this rather
puzzling remark go by with barely a nod. We stared out the window for a moment, not speaking. A slow-moving line had formed along the wall on the street below, mostly elderly, each person clutching a piece of paper. Del Piero explained that on the last Friday of each month, one of the local newspapers held a raffle. Their offices were around the corner. You only had to turn in a completed crossword puzzle to enter. The man in a baseball cap leaning against the wall was, according to Del Piero, a dealer in completed crosswords. By his very stance, by the slouch of shoulders, you might have guessed he was involved in something much more illicit—the trade in stolen copper, the trafficking of narcotics, the buying and selling of orphans. I had barely noticed him, but now it was clear: the buyers came one at a time, furtively slipping the man in the cap a coin or two, and taking the paper he handed them. The old people rushed off with their answer key, to join the line and fill in the squares of their still-incomplete puzzles.

  “What are they giving away this month?”

  “How should I know?” Del Piero said. “Alarm clocks. Blenders. Washing machines like the ones that killed my Matilde.” His face went pallid. “Your uncle wasn’t blind. I know you won’t believe me. But he murdered her, I just know he did.”

  Del Piero muttered a few words to himself in Italian, and then walked back to his desk. I followed him. “Explain yourself,” I said, but he shook his head sadly, and slumped in his chair. He looked as if he might cry.

  No one else seemed to notice our miniature drama, and I wondered if translators in this office often fell to weeping in the course of their labors. I grabbed a chair, and sat in front of his desk, staring at Del Piero as I do in court sometimes when I want a witness to know I will not relent. “Say it again. Explain it to me.”

  Del Piero raised a hand for a moment, then seemed to reconsider, letting it drop slowly to the desk. There were beads of sweat gathering at his temples. The man was wilting before me. “What is there to explain? He could see. Your uncle moved around the office like a ballerina. I don’t do anything all day, you know. No one speaks Italian anymore. Two calls a day. Three at most. All from young men who want visas, boys whose great-grandfathers were born in Tuscany, or Palermo, or wherever. And I negotiate with court clerks to get copies of ancient birth certificates. Do you realize that Italy barely existed as a nation then? All this fiction, all these elegant half-truths, just so yet another one of ours can flee! I know the score. They’re all flying to Milan to get sex changes. Cheap balloon tits, like the girls in the magazines. Collagen implants. I can hear it in their voices. They’re not cut out for life here. And so, what do I do? All day, I wait for the phone to ring, and while I wait, I watch them. The Chinese, the Arabs, the Hindus. I listen. I watch.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He could see, damn it. I know this. Matilde and I would sit by that window, waiting for the phone to ring, drinking coffee, and I would describe for her what was happening on the street below. That swarthy guy in the ball cap—we talked about him every Friday! And she loved it. She said your uncle described things just as well. That he had a magical sense of direction, so perfect that if she hadn’t known better, she would’ve doubted he was blind.”

  “He wasn’t born like that, you know. He used to be able to see. What she said sounds like a compliment to me.”

  “If you say so.” Del Piero looked unimpressed. “They’re going to fire me now.”

  I didn’t want to feel pity for him, but I couldn’t help it.

  He went on: “Matilde would have quit in protest. She loved me that much. And if she quit, your uncle would have too. He was their best worker—they never would’ve let him walk. His English was better than the Queen’s!”

  The Queen? I stood to go. “I appreciate your time,” I said, though his phone had been silent since I’d arrived.

  Del Piero caught me looking. “I got a call earlier. I might get another this afternoon.” Then he shrugged; he didn’t believe it himself. He walked me out, his sad, heavy eyes trained on the floor. At the staircase, he stopped. “Coloro che amiamo non ci abbandonano mai, essi vivono nei nostri ricordi,” he said.

  “Is that so?”

  Del Piero nodded gravely. “Indeed. It’s not much, but it’ll have to do.”

  I thanked him. Whatever it meant, it did sound nice.

  —

  RAMÓN LOST HIS SIGHT in a fireworks mishap at age seven, when I was only three. I have no memories of him before the accident, and to me, he has always been my blind uncle. He was my father’s youngest brother, half brother actually, separated by more than twenty years, and you could say we grew up, if not together, then in parallel. By the time Ramón was born, my grandfather’s politics had softened quite a bit, so the child was spared a Russian name. My grandfather lived with us, but I never heard him and my father exchange more than a few words. I spent my childhood ferrying messages between the two men—Tell your father this, tell your grandfather that . . . They’d had a falling-out when I was very young, a political disagreement that morphed into a personal one, the details of which no one ever bothered to explain.

  Ramón’s mother, my grandfather’s last mistress, was a thin, delicate woman who never smiled, and when I was in elementary and middle school, she would bring her son over every week or so to see my grandfather. I was an only child in a funereal house, and I liked the company. Ramón made a point of addressing me as nephew, and my father as brother, with such rigor that I understood his mother had taught him to do so. I didn’t mind. He always had a new dirty joke to share, something beautifully vulgar he had learned from his classmates at the Normal School for Boys in the old city center. He must’ve been fourteen or fifteen. A serious student of English even then, he would record the BBC evening news on the shortwave, and play it back, over and over, until he understood and could repeat every word. His dedication to the exercise always impressed me.

  To my ear, the house got even quieter whenever Ramón and his mother arrived, but he liked our place for precisely the opposite reason: with its creaky wooden floors, he could hear himself coming and going, he said, and the space made sense to him. It was large, and the high ceilings gave the human voice a sonority that reminded him of church. Sometimes he would ask me to lead him on a tour of the place, just to test his own impressions of the house, and we would shuttle up and down the steps, or tiptoe along the walls of the living room so he could trace its dimensions. He had memories of the house from before the accident, but they were dimmer each day, and he was aware that his brain had changed. It was changing still, he’d tell me ominously, even now, even at this very moment. I thought he was crazy, but I liked to hear him talk. My mother had lined the stairwell with framed photographs, and Ramón would have me describe what seemed to be quite ordinary family scenes of birthday parties and vacations, my school pictures, or my father with a client celebrating some legal victory.

  “Am I in any of them?” Ramón asked me once, and the question caught me so off guard that I said nothing. I remember a ball of pain in the hollow of my stomach, and panic spreading slowly up to my chest, my arms. I held my breath until Ramón began laughing.

  He would have been forty-four this year.

  The centerpiece of each visit was a closed-door sit-down with my grandfather. They spoke about Ramón’s studies, his plans, my ailing grandfather dispensing stern bits of wisdom gathered from his forty years as a municipal judge. I was always a bit jealous of these; the undivided attention my grandfather gave Ramón was something my father never gave me. But by the time I was ten, the old man was barely there, his moments of lucidity increasingly brief, until everything was a jumble of names and dates, and he could barely recognize any of us. In the twenty-odd years since my grandfather passed away, my father’s mind has collapsed along a similar, if slightly more erratic pattern, as perhaps mine will too, eventually. My inheritance, such as it is. One day, after Ramón’s conversation with my grandfa
ther, he and I went on a walk through the neighborhood. I must have been twelve or thirteen. We were only a few blocks from my house when Ramón announced that he wouldn’t be coming to visit anymore. “There’s no point,” he said. He was finishing school, and would soon be attending the university on a scholarship. We were walking in the sun, along the wide, tree-lined median that ran down the main avenue of my district. Ramón had a hand in his pocket, had insisted on going barefoot so he could feel the texture of the grass between his toes. He had tied the laces of his sneakers, and wore them slung around his neck.

  “What about me?” I said.

  He smiled at the question. “You’re a lucky boy. You live with your dad.”

  I had nothing to say to that.

  “Do you want to see something?” Ramón took his hand from his pocket, opening it to reveal a small spool of copper wire, bent and coiled into an impossible knot. I asked him what it was.

  “It’s a map,” he said.

  I took it when he passed it to me, careful not to disturb its shape.

  “Every time we turn, I bend it,” he explained. “And so I never get lost.”

  “Never?”

  “I’m very careful with it.”

  “It’s nice,” I said, because that was all I could think to say.

  Ramón nodded. “My father isn’t coming back. Your grandfather. His mind has . . .” He cupped his hands together, then opened them with a small sound, as if he’d been holding a tiny bomb that had just gone off.

  “The old guy’s not going to miss me.”

  The sun was bright, and Ramón turned toward it, so that his face glowed. I couldn’t deny that he looked very happy.

  When we got back to the house, my grandfather was in the living room, asleep in front of the television, taking shallow breaths through his open mouth. He’d been watching opera, and now Ramón’s mother sat by his side, combing his hair. She stood when she saw her son, nodding at me without a hint of warmth, and then gathered her things. She left the comb balanced on my grandfather’s knee.