The King Is Always Above the People

by Daniel Alarcón

  It took almost no effort to restrain him.

  “I’m blind, I’m blind,” he murmured.

  I listened to the cadence of his breath. The other inmates had spread out to the pink corners of the room, as far as they could manage to be from my old man. They eyed one another tensely, and no one spoke. Just then, a black-haired nurse appeared before us. She wanted to know if everything was all right.

  “Yes,” I said, but my father shook his head. He cleared his throat, and it was only then that he dropped his hand from over his eyes, blinking as he adjusted to the light.

  “Alma,” he said, “my brother has died, and I am bereft. I must be released for the funeral. He has been murdered. It is a tragedy.”

  The nurse looked at my old man, then at me. I shook my head very slightly, hoping he wouldn’t notice.

  “Mr. Cano, I’m very sorry for your loss.” Alma sounded as if she were reading from a script.

  Still my father thanked her. “You’re very kind, but I must leave at once. There are details to be taken care of.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  “My brother . . .”

  “Papa,” I said.

  “Mr. Cano, you cannot leave without a judge’s approval.”

  I held my father, and felt the strength gather within him at the very sound of these words. He puffed up, his shoulders straightened. This was likely the least effective pretext one could give my father, the son of a judge, a man who had spent first his childhood and then his entire adult life wandering the corridors of judicial power, a man who had passed on to his own son, if little affection, at least much of this same access. He smiled triumphantly, and turned to me. “Your cell phone, please, boy. I know a few judges.”

  I pretended to search my pockets for my phone, as my old man watched me hopefully. By then Yvette had joined us, somehow gentler than I had noticed her to be at first, and she met his gaze, then touched his shoulder, and just like that he slipped from my hold, and into her orbit entirely.

  “They’ve murdered my brother . . .” I heard my old man say, his voice mournful and low. Yvette nodded, leading him to the blue-green couch, and he went without a fight, collapsing onto it heavily. She kneeled next to him. Alma went off to soothe the other patients, who had been watching us with great anxiety, and just like that, I was alone. I could hear Yvette and my father murmuring conspiratorially, fraternally, now laughing tenderly, a voice breaking, now humming in unison what sounded like a nursery rhyme. With Alma’s encouragement, the other inmates were spreading about the room again, in slow, tentative steps, as if trying to move without being seen. Yvette walked over to me.

  “I’m sorry about your uncle,” she said.

  She glanced at my father, and then left us alone. I took her spot beside him, and together we watched the men drifting to their former places. The days here, I realized, are punctuated by these outbursts, these small crises that help break up the hours. These men had been socialized to expect discrete moments of tension, to defer to the impulse, whether theirs or someone else’s, to fashion a disturbance from thin air. And they were experts too, at forgetting it all, at recovering, at turning back into themselves and whatever private despair kept them company. Except one of them: a slight, well-dressed man pacing back and forth in front of me and my father, occasionally pausing to flash us a confused glare. It took me a moment to realize what had happened: he carried a comic book in his right hand. We’d taken his seat.

  I pointed him out to my father, and he shrugged. “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

  “He was sitting right here.”

  “Of course. They were all sitting right here. And they can all sit right here again as soon as I get up.”

  “Papa, don’t get upset.”

  “I’m not upset,” he said, then corrected himself. “That’s not true. I am upset. I would prefer he stop staring. It’s rude. Tonight I will take his belt, and hang him with it.”

  I sighed. “Why would you do that, Papa?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, his voice suddenly weak.

  It was honest at least: he didn’t know. My father remained, all these years later, the person most mystified by his predicament, by the actions and impulses that had brought him here. “It’s okay, Papa.” I tried to put an arm around him, but he shook me off.

  “It’s not okay. I’m going to die here. Not tomorrow, not next week, but eventually. The oceans are rising, and my blind brother has been murdered. My ungrateful son never visits, and my whore wife has forgotten me.”

  “Ex-wife,” I said. I didn’t mean to.

  My father scowled, his gaze narrowing. “Whore ex-wife,” he said. “Go. No one wants you here. Leave.”

  —

  THE LAST TIME I saw Ramón was at a family party, about three years ago. It was my father’s sixty-fifth birthday, his first since the arrest. This was before the divorce got under way, and my mother was still hanging in there. We decided to get my old man out for the party, just for the evening—not an easy task, but certainly not unheard of for a family of our connections, and our means. I was optimistic in the weeks before the party, and saw to it that my mother was as well. I thought it would be good for them both, to see each other, and especially good for him to be reminded of the life he’d once had. I paid courtesy visits to bureaucrats all over town, spoke elliptically about my father’s situation and looked for the right opening, the right moment, to place money discreetly into the hands of those men who might be able to help us. But nothing happened: my calls went unreturned, the openings never came through. In the end, I had to tell my mother, only hours before the party, that the director of the asylum, whom I had spoken to directly and pressured through various surrogates, wouldn’t take the bribe, just as no judge would sign the order, and no prison official would allow themselves to be bent. My father wouldn’t be joining us.

  She had spent a lifetime with him, and had become accustomed to getting her way. It was clear she didn’t believe me. “How much did you offer?”

  “More than enough,” I told her. “No one wants to help him anymore.”

  My mother sat before her mirror, delicately applying makeup, her reddish-brown hair still pulled back. She had outlined her lips, and examined them now, getting so close to the glass I thought she might kiss herself. “It’s not that. It’s not that at all,” she said. “You just didn’t try hard enough.”

  That night Ramón arrived by himself, dressed as if for a funeral in a sober black suit and starched white shirt. His hair was cut so short that he looked like an enlisted man, or a police officer, and he had chosen to come without the dark glasses he sometimes wore. I’d never seen him this way. I was surprised to find him there, as was my mother, and for a moment much of the whispered conversation at the party had to do with his presence: Who had invited Ramón? How did he know? Why had he come? I led him through the thin crowd of friends and well-wishers, introducing him to everyone. Oh, you’re Vladimiro’s younger brother, some colleague of my father’s might say, though for most of them, this was the first they’d ever heard of Ramón. If he noticed the chatter, he didn’t let on. There were many fewer guests than we had imagined—even my uncle Yuri had called with an excuse—and the brightly decorated room seemed rather dismal with only a handful of people milling around. It was early yet, I told myself.

  Ramón moved easily through the party, falling gracefully in and out of various conversations. He let go of my arm every time we stopped before a new group of people, holding his hand out and waiting for someone to shake it. Eventually, someone would. He held Natalya in a long embrace, whispering, “Dear sister, dear, dear sister.” I left him chatting with my wife while I went for drinks, and our daughters, three and four years old at the time, climbed into his arms without hesitation. He beamed for a quick photo, and then released them, and measured their height against his waist. My
wife told me later that he had remembered not only their names, but also their birthdays and their ages, though he hadn’t seen them since my youngest was born.

  My mother had positioned herself at the landing of the staircase, at one end of the large room, where she could survey the entire affair, and eventually we made our way over to her. Ramón asked me to leave them alone. They huddled together for a few moments, whispering, and when my mother raised her head again, her eyes were glassy with tears. She gathered herself, and called for everyone’s attention. Ramón stood by her side. She began by thanking everyone for coming to celebrate this difficult birthday, how much it meant to all of us, to my father and his family. “We did what we could to have him here with us this evening, but it just wasn’t possible,” she said. She looked at me. “My husband has sent his youngest brother, Ramón, in his place, and I want to thank him for coming to be with us.”

  After acknowledging the polite applause, Ramón scanned the crowd, or seemed to, his lifeless gray eyes flitting left and right. There couldn’t have been more than fifteen people altogether, everyone standing, waiting for something to happen. Someone coughed. Ramón asked that the music be turned down, cleared his throat, then went on to describe a version of my father I didn’t recognize. A generous man, always available with a loving hand for his younger brother, a man who had helped guide and encourage him. Who had sat with him “after the accident that left me blind, the accident that made me who I am.” My mother was sobbing softly now. “Vladimiro helped pay for my studies. He paid for my tutor, and helped me land the job where, by the grace of God, I was to meet my wife, Matilde.” Then he raised a hand, and began singing “Happy Birthday,” his voice clear and unwavering.

  He sang the first line entirely alone before anyone thought to join in.

  I found him, not long after, sitting in what had been my grandfather’s favorite chair. He smiled when he heard my voice, he called me nephew. I asked him about life. It had been so long since we’d really talked. Matilde was well, he told me, and sent her regrets. They’d bought a house in the Thousands—Where? I thought to myself—and were talking about having a baby. He congratulated me on my family, and said, with a playful smile, that he could tell by the timbre of my wife’s voice that she was still quite beautiful. I laughed at the compliment.

  “Your instincts are, as ever, unfailing,” I said.

  We were—my wife and I—very happy in those days.

  Ramón talked briefly about his work, which in spite of the feeble economy, remained steady: Italian was an increasingly irrelevant language, of course, but as long as America remained powerful, he and Matilde would never go hungry. Each day he took calls from the embassy, the DEA, or the Mormons. They trusted him. They asked for him by name.

  We fell silent. The party hummed around us, and looking at our uncomfortable guests, I wondered why anyone would want to be part of our family.

  “How did my father sound,” I asked, “when you talked to him?”

  Ramón ran his fingernails along the fabric of the armrest. “I didn’t actually speak to him, you know. He had someone call me.” He paused, and let out a small, sharp laugh. “I guess he couldn’t get to a phone. I assume they’re very strict about those things.”

  “I suppose.”

  “But then, I’ve heard you can get anything in prison,” he said. “Is that true?”

  “It’s not exactly a prison, where he is.”

  “But he could’ve called me himself if he’d wanted to?”

  I looked over my shoulder at the thinning party. “He’s never called me, if that’s what you want to know.”

  Ramón tapped his fingers to the slow rhythm of the music that was playing, an old bolero, something my father would’ve liked.

  “That was quite a performance,” I said. “Your speech, I mean.”

  “It was for your mother.”

  “Then I suppose I should thank you.”

  “If you like.” He sighed. “My father loved Vladimiro very much. He was so proud of your dad, he talked about him all the time. He was heartbroken that they’d stopped speaking.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Why do you ask if you won’t believe my answer?” Ramón shook his head. “Do you visit him?”

  “As much as I can.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “As much as I can stand to.”

  Ramón nodded. “He’s not an easy man. Matilde didn’t want me to come. She has a sense about these things. And she’s never wrong.”

  I thought he might explain this comment, but he didn’t. It just lingered. “So why are you here?” I asked.

  “Family is family.” He smiled. “That’s what I told her. She had quite a laugh with that one.”

  —

  AND THEN, this afternoon, I went to Gaza. I took the bus, because I wanted to ride the 73, and sit, as Ramón and Matilde so often had, in the uncomfortable metal seats, beside the scratched and dirty windows, closing my eyes and listening to the breathing city as it passed. The air thickened as we rode south, so that it felt almost like rain, heavy, gray, and damp. The farther we went on Cahuide, the slower traffic became, and when I got off at the thirty-second block, beneath the remains of the bridge, I saw why. A stream of people filtered across the avenue in a nearly unbroken line: women carrying babies, stocky young men bent beneath the loads teetering on their backs, and children who appeared to be scampering across just for the sport of it. The median fence was no match for this human wave: already it had been knocked over, trampled, and appeared in places to be in danger of disappearing entirely. The harsh sounds of a dozen horns filled the street with an endless noise that most people seemed not to notice, but that shook my skull from the inside. I stopped for a moment to admire the bridge, its crumbling green exterior and shorn middle, its steel rods poking through the concrete and bending down toward the avenue. A couple of kids sat at the scarred edge, their legs dangling just over the lip. They laughed and floated paper airplanes into the sky, arcing them elegantly above the rushing crowd.

  I walked up from the avenue along an unnamed street no wider than an alley, blocked off at one end with stacks of bricks and two rusting oil drums filled with sand. A rope hung limply between the drums, and I slipped under it, careful not to let it touch my suit. A boy on a bicycle rolled by, smacking his chewing gum loudly as he passed. He did a loop around me, staring, sizing me up, then pedaled off, unimpressed. I kept walking to where the road sloped up just slightly, widening into a small outdoor market, where a few people milled about the stalls stocked with plastics and off-brand clothes and flowers and grains, and then through it, to the corner of José Olaya and Avenida Unidad. There I found Carlotta.

  The lawyer who’d called me yesterday with the news had advised me to look for a woman at a tea cart. She can show you the house, he said over the phone. Your house. That afternoon, as promised, a courier came by with Ramón’s keys, along with a handwritten note from the lawyer once again reiterating this small piece of advice: Look for Carlotta, the note read, though there was no description of her. You’ll never find the house without help.

  In fact, it did all look the same, each street identical to the last, each house a version of the one next to it. Carlotta was sitting on a small wooden stool reading a newspaper when I walked up. I introduced myself, and explained that I needed to take a look at my uncle’s house. She stood very slowly and wrapped me in a tight embrace. “They were so wonderful,” she said. She kept her hand on mine, and didn’t let go, just stood there, shaking her head and murmuring what sounded like a prayer. I waited for her to finish. Finally, she excused herself, went inside the unpainted brick house just behind her, and emerged a few moments later dragging a boy behind. He was eighteen or so, skinny, and looked as if he’d just been sleeping. He wore unlaced white high-top sneakers with no socks, and his thin, delicate ankles emerged from these clownish s
hoes with a comic poignancy. Her son, Carlotta explained, would watch the stand while we went to Ramón and Matilde’s house. It wasn’t far. The boy glanced in my direction through red, swollen eyes, then nodded, though he seemed displeased with the arrangement.

  As Carlotta and I walked up the street, she pointed out a few neighborhood landmarks: the first pharmacy in the area; the first Internet kiosk; an adobe wall pockmarked with bullet holes, site of a murder that had made the news a few years ago. A police checkpoint, from the days when the name Gaza came into use, had stood right at the intersection we strolled through now. These were peaceful times, she said. She showed me the footbridge that crossed over the canal, and the open field just beyond it, where the turbid floodwaters gathered once a year or so. It was where the teenagers organized soccer tournaments, where the Christians held their monthly revivals, and where a few local deejays threw parties that lasted until first light. Awful music, she said, like a blast furnace, just noise. Her son had been at one of those, she told me, just last night. He was her youngest boy. “He’s not a bad kid. I don’t want you thinking he’s trouble. Do you have children?”

  “Two daughters.”

  She sighed. “But girls are different.”

  We turned left just before the footbridge, and walked a way along the canal, then turned left again to the middle of the block, stopping in front of a saffron yellow house. It was the only painted one on the entire street.

  “It’s yellow,” I said to Carlotta, disbelieving. “Why is it yellow?”

  She shrugged. “He did translations, favors. People paid him however they could.”

  “By painting a blind man’s house?”

  Carlotta didn’t seem to find it that funny, or remarkable at all. “We called your uncle ‘Doctor,’” she said, and gave me a stern look. “Out of respect.”

  I said nothing. There was a metal gate over the door and two deadbolts, and it took a moment to find the right keys. I’d never been to their house before, and I felt suddenly guilty visiting for the first time under these circumstances. Just inside the door there were a jacket and hat hanging from a nail, and below it, a small, two-tiered shoe rack containing rubber mud boots, beige men’s and women’s slippers, and two pairs of matching Velcro sneakers. There were a couple of empty spaces on the rack. For their work shoes, I supposed, the ones they had died in. Without saying a word, Carlotta and I left our shoes behind, and walked on into the house wearing only our socks. We didn’t take the slippers.