The King Is Always Above the People

by Daniel Alarcón

  “It’s time to go,” she said. “Careful. Don’t wake your father. Now say goodbye to your nephew.”

  He shook my hand very formally, and I saw very little of him after that.

  My grandfather died two years later.

  —

  LAST NIGHT I couldn’t sleep. For hours, I lay on my back, the bedside lamp on, admiring the ceiling and its eerie yellow tint. My wife slept with the blanket pulled over her head, so still it was possible to imagine I was all alone.

  I thought of the truck, out of control and speeding, tearing the bridge down as it raced south. Or of Ramón, walking Matilde steadily, lovingly, to her death. In their haste, the local emergency crews neglected to block off the bridge’s stairs on either side of the avenue. Four hours later, my uncle and aunt climbed these same stairs on their way to the bus stop, but they never made it, of course, tumbling onto the avenue instead, where they were killed by oncoming traffic.

  It had been in all the afternoon papers on Thursday, along with photos of the truck driver, Rabassa, an unshaven young man with a sheepish smile, who wore his light brown hair in a ponytail. In interviews, he offered his heartfelt condolences to the families, but, on the advice of counsel, had little else to say about the accident. I would have given him the same advice. In the classic understated style common to our local journalists, the ruined bridge was now being called THE BRIDGE OF DEATH, or alternatively, THE BRIDGE TO DEATH.

  At home, my wife and I instructed the maid to let the phone ring, and at the office, I asked my secretary to screen all the calls, and hang up on radio, television, or print reporters. It was only a matter of time, and by yesterday morning, when it was discovered that Ramón was related to my father, the scrutiny only intensified. There were now two scandals in play. In the afternoon, when I went to pick my daughters up from school, a young reporter, a boy of no more than twenty, followed me to my car, asking me for a comment, for anything, a phrase, a string of expletives, a word, a cry of pain. He had hungry eyes, and the sort of untrustworthy smile common to youth here: he could commit neither to smiling nor to frowning, the thin edges of his lips suspended somewhere in between. “Do you plan to sue?” he shouted, as my daughters and I hurried toward the car.

  Last night I read the afternoon editions very carefully, with something approximating terror: What if someone had managed to get through to my father, to pry a comment from him? It would be difficult, given his situation, but not unthinkable, and surely he would oblige with something outrageous, something terrible. I bought a dozen papers, and read every page—testimonials from neighbors, interviews with civil engineers and trucking experts, comments from the outraged president of a community advocacy group and the reticent spokesman of the transport workers union, along with photos of the site—a hundred opinions through which to filter this ordinary tragedy, but fortunately, nothing from my father. There was nothing on the television either.

  This morning, Saturday, I went to see my old man to tell him the news myself, and make certain the asylum’s authorities were aware that soon the press would be calling. Apparently there had been attempts already, but I was relieved to discover my father had lost more of his privileges, including, just last week, the right to receive incoming calls. He’d long ago been barred from making them. Of course, there were some cell phones floating among the population of the asylum, so the secretary couldn’t offer me any guarantees. She didn’t know all the details, but his nurse, she assured me, would explain everything.

  My old man has been in the asylum for three years now. He is only sixty-eight, young to be in the shape he’s in. Every time I go, he’s different, as if he’s trying on various pathologies to see how they suit him. It happened so slowly I hardly noticed, until the day three and a half years ago that he attacked a man in court—his own client—stabbing him multiple times in the neck and chest with a letter opener, nearly killing him. It came as a great surprise to us, and the press loved the story. The scandal went on for months, and no aspect went unreported. For example, it was noted with evident delight that my father’s client, the victim—on trial for money laundering—might serve time with his former lawyer if convicted. One columnist used the matter to discuss the possibility of prison reform, while a rather mean-spirited political cartoonist presented the pair as lovers, holding hands and playing house in a well-appointed prison cell. My mother stopped answering the phone and reading the papers; in fact, she rarely left home. But none of this chatter was relevant in the end: the money launderer recovered from his stabbing and was acquitted; my father was not.

  His trial was mercifully brief. My old man, charged with assault and attempted murder, facing a prison sentence that would take him deep into his eighties, wisely opted for an insanity plea. Out of respect for his class and professional history, room was made for him at the asylum, and though it was jarring at first, over time he has become essentially indistinguishable from the other guests.

  I was shown to the visitors’ room by a pale, tired-looking nurse, who told me my old man had been in a bad mood recently. “He’s been acting out.”

  I’d never seen her before. “Are you new?” I asked.

  She walked briskly, and I struggled to keep up. She told me she’d been transferred from the women’s pavilion. I tried to make small talk, about how things were over there, if she was adjusting to the inevitable differences between the genders, but she wasn’t interested, and only wanted to tell me about my father. “He’s a real sweetheart,” she said, and she was worried about him. He wasn’t eating, and some days he refused to take his medication. The previous week, he had tossed his plate at a man who happened to bump him in the lunch line. “It was spaghetti day. You can imagine the mess.”

  In case I couldn’t, she went on to describe it, how my old man walked calmly from his victim, and sat down in front of a television in a corner of the cafeteria, watching a nature show with the sound off, waiting for the nurses to arrive; how when they did, he crossed his wrists and held his arms out in front of him, as if expecting handcuffs, which, she assured me, “we rarely use with men like your father.” Meanwhile, a few terrified patients had begun to cry: they thought the victim was bleeding to death before their very eyes, that those were his organs spilling from his wounded body. The nurse sighed heavily. All sorts of ideas hold sway among the residents of the asylum. Some believed in thieves who stole men’s kidneys, their livers, and their lungs, and it was impossible to convince them otherwise.

  We had come to a locked door. I thanked her for telling me.

  “You should visit him more often,” she said.

  A fluorescent light shone above us, cold, clinical. I kept my gaze fixed on her, until I could see the color gathering in her cheeks. I straightened the knot of my tie.

  “Should I?” I said. “Is that what you think?”

  The nurse looked down at her feet, suddenly fidgety and nervous. “I’m sorry.” She pulled a key ring from her jacket pocket, and as she did, her silver cigarette case fell with a crash, a dozen long, thin smokes fanning out across the concrete floor like the confused outline of a corpse.

  I watched her gather them. Her face was very red now.

  “My name is Yvette,” she said, “if you need anything.”

  I didn’t answer.

  Then we were through the door, and into a large, rather desolate common room. There were a few ragged couches and a pressboard bookcase along a white wall, its shelves picked almost clean, save for a thin volume on canoe repair, a yellowing Cold War spy novel, and some fashion magazines with half the pages missing. There were a dozen men, not more, and the room was quiet.

  Where was everyone?

  Yvette explained that many of the patients—she had used this word all along, not inmates or prisoners, as some others did—were still in the cafeteria, and some had retired to their rooms.

  “Cells?” I asked.

  Yvette pursed
her lips. “If you prefer.” She continued: and many were outside, in the gardens. The morning had dawned clear in this part of the city, and I imagined a careless game of volleyball, a couple of men standing flat-footed on either side of a sagging net, and quickly realized these were images drawn from movies, that in fact, I had no idea how those confined against their will to a hospital for the criminally insane might make use of a rare day of bright, limpid sun. They might lie in the grass and nap, or pick flowers, listen for birds or the not-so-distant sounds of city traffic. Or perhaps glide across the open yard, its yellow grass ceding territory each day to the bare, dark earth, these so-called gardens, each inmate just one man within a ballet much larger, much lonelier than himself.

  My father preferred to stay indoors. Early on he wasn’t permitted outside, and so had become, like a house cat, accustomed to watching from the windows, too proud to admit any interest in going out himself. In the three years I’d been visiting him, we’d walked the gardens only once: one gray morning beneath a solemn sky, on his birthday, his first after the divorce. He’d walked with his head down the entire time. I mentioned this, and Yvette nodded.

  “Well, they’re not exactly gardens, you know.”

  Just as Yvette was not exactly a nurse, this prison not exactly a hospital. Of course I knew. I watched a woman read to a group of inmates, what amounted to a children’s story, and she could hardly get through a sentence without being interrupted. My father sat in his usual spot, by the high window in the far corner, overlooking a few little-used footpaths that wended between the trees surrounding the main building. He was alone, which upset me, until I noticed that all the patients in this group were essentially alone, even the ones who were, nominally at least, together. A dozen solitary men scattered about, lost in thought or drugged into somnolence.

  Yvette patted my arm, and excused herself wordlessly.

  I made my way toward my father, past a small table along a salmon-colored wall that was stacked with games and pamphlets, and with a bulletin board just above it, announcing the week’s program—POETRY NIGHT, SPORTS NIGHT, CEVICHE NIGHT. Hardly an evening passed, as far as I could tell, without a planned activity of some kind; it was no wonder these men seemed so tired. They all wore their own clothes, ranging from the shabby to the somewhat elegant, and this lack of uniform dress operated as a kind of shorthand, revealing at first glance which of these men had been abandoned, and which still maintained, however tenuously, some connection to the world outside. There were unkempt men in threadbare, faded T-shirts, and others who looked as if they might have a business meeting later, who still took the trouble to keep their leather shoes oiled and polished. A man in denim overalls sat at one of the two long tables writing a letter. An unplugged television sat at an angle to the small couch, its gray, bulbous eye reflecting the light pouring in through the windows. The curtains were pulled, but the windows themselves did not open, and the room was quite warm.

  I sat on the windowsill.

  “Hi, Papa,” I said.

  He didn’t respond, only closed his eyes, gripping the arms of his chair to steady himself. He looked like my grandfather had so many years ago, shrunken, with long, narrow fingers, the bones of his hands visible beneath the skin. I hadn’t seen him in six weeks or so. I asked him how he was, and he looked up and all around me, gazing above me and beyond me, with a theatrical expression of utter confusion, as if he were hearing a voice and couldn’t figure where it was coming from.

  “Me?” he asked. “Little old me?”

  I waited.

  “I’m fine,” my father said. “A robust specimen of old age in the twilight of Western civilization. It’s not me you should worry about. Someone snuck a newspaper in here two weeks ago. You can’t imagine the scandal it caused. Is it true the oceans are rising?”

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  He sighed. “When will the Americans learn? I can picture it—can you picture it? The seas on a slow boil, turning yellow, turning red. The fish rise to the surface. They feel pain, you know. Those people who say they don’t are liars.”

  “Who says that?”

  “Water heightens sensitivity, boy. When I was a child, I loved to sit in the bathtub. I liked watching my cock float in the bathwater and then shrivel and shrink as the water got cold.”

  “Papa.”

  “Sometimes it’s so loud in here, I can’t breathe. I will break that television if anyone attempts to turn it on. I will pick it up and break it over the head of anyone who goes near it. Just keep your eye on it. Just tell me if someone plugs it in. Will you do that, boy?”

  I nodded, just to keep him calm, and tried to imagine the act. My father versus the television: his back would crumble, his fingers would crack, what remained of his body would collapse into a thimbleful of dust. The television would emerge unscathed; my father most certainly would not. When he spoke he waved his arms, fidgeted and shook, and even these small gestures seemed to be wearing him out. He was breathing heavily, his bird chest rising and falling.

  “The nurse says you haven’t been eating.”

  “The menu is not interesting,” my old man said. He bit his bottom lip.

  “And your meds? Are they interesting?”

  He glared at me for a second. “Honestly, no. There is a gentleman here with whom I have made a small wager. He says there is a women’s pavilion, not far from this building, full of loose women, crazier than hell. They tear your clothes off with their teeth. I say that’s impossible. What do you know of it?”

  “It’s a beautiful day out, Papa. We could go out and see for ourselves.”

  “No need for that.”

  “What does the winner of this wager get?”

  My father smiled. “Money, boy—what else?”

  “I don’t know anything about it, Papa,” I said. “But I have some news.”

  At the sound of these words, after all the talk and movement, he fixed his stare on me, nodding, then closed his eyes to indicate he was listening.

  “Ramón. Your brother Ramón. He’s dead.”

  My father squinted at me. “The young one?”

  I nodded. “Has anyone called you about this?”

  He looked surprised. “Called me? Why would anyone call me?”

  “The press, I mean. Have you talked to anyone?”

  He dismissed the very idea with a wave of his hand. “Of course not,” he said. “Am I in the papers?”

  “The usual.”

  He smiled with a melancholy pride. “They don’t get tired of me.”

  “I’m executor of the estate,” I said.

  “What estate? Ramón doesn’t have an estate!” My old man laughed. “Let me guess . . . You’re honored.”

  I could have hit him then. It happens every time I visit, and each time, I breathe, I wait for it to pass. And I think of my daughters, who will never see their grandfather again, and specifically of my youngest, who has no memories of him at all.

  “How did it happen?” my old man asked.

  And so I told him the story, what I knew of it—Rabassa’s truck and the washing machines, the pedestrian bridge and the bus—as my father listened with closed eyes, letting his chin drop to his chest. As I recounted the events, the order of them, their inevitable conclusion, it sounded so asinine I felt he might not believe me at all. They had not been close. They had spoken little since my grandfather died, since my father had carved up the inheritance, keeping all that he could for himself. Ramón used his share to support his mother, and when she passed away, to buy the house where he and Matilde lived. There was little left over for anything else. My father’s sister, my aunt Natalya, and his full brother, my uncle Yuri, pooled their shares together and bought a condo in Miami overlooking Biscayne Bay. My father got the bulk of the estate, of course, enough to live comfortably for many years, and that eventually covered his defense, the divorce
settlement, his upkeep at the asylum. He even set aside a portion for me, his only child, which my wife and I used as a down payment on a house in a part of the city with only one name, and no pedestrian bridges. We have lived there since we were married eight years ago.

  When I finished, he was quiet for a long moment, and seemed to be processing what I had told him. He could have just as easily been trying to recall who this brother was, and why it should bother him that Ramón was dead.

  “She wasn’t blind,” my father said finally. “That bitch had cataracts, it’s true, but she could see. She killed him.”

  For a moment, I couldn’t say anything; I just stared at my father, wondering why I’d bothered. “Jesus,” I said. “She sure seemed blind at the wedding.”

  My father looked at me. “How do you seem blind?”

  “I was joking.”

  “Jokes,” he said, disgusted. “I don’t like your jokes.” He stood abruptly. His shirt hung off him like a robe, and his belt had been pulled tight to the last hole, cinching his pants high above his waist, the fabric ballooning about his midsection. I reached to help him, but he shook me off.

  “Papa, you have to eat,” I said.

  He ignored me, covered his eyes with one hand, and staggered toward the center of the room, a shaky arm raised before him. He stumbled toward the lesser of the two couches, where a nicely dressed gentleman sat thumbing through a pornographic comic book. As my father approached, the man cried out and fled. I called to my father, but he paid no attention, only changed direction, moving toward one of the tables now. There, the man writing the letter abandoned his work, and shuffled off to the corner of the room. The nurse who had been reading hurried over to see what was the matter, but I got to my father first, this blind, wobbling zombie; I put an arm around him, holding him gently, his thin frame, his hollow chest.