The King Is Always Above the People

by Daniel Alarcón

  “They seem fine to me.”

  She takes another sip of tea. “And my eyes?”

  “Your eyes.”

  “How are they?”

  He peers at her, squinting even, examining her big green eyes. “No problem there.”

  “There is the issue of the glasses. I can’t see very well without them.”

  “Yes, there is that.”

  “But still, I seem to you, in general terms, healthy?”

  “I suppose so,” says Hernán.

  Lena frowns. “You suppose.”

  He shrugs sheepishly, suddenly wishing he hadn’t said anything at all.

  “Clarisa said you were a doctor.”

  He begins to protest, but finds himself unable. Lena’s teeth are nearly perfect. Her eyes are a shade of green that recalls a turbid sea. Why get bogged down in details?

  “I am,” Hernán says. “I’m a doctor.”

  With that, Lena undoes her ponytail, curls tumbling down to her shoulders. She runs her fingers through them, smiling. Performing. Then she turns away from him, and lifts her hair from the back with her left hand. With her right index finger, she traces a meandering line across the curve of her head, until it comes to rest on a most unexpected bald spot, pink and round, the diameter of a small silver coin.

  “Touch it,” she says.

  And he does: the skin is soft and entirely hairless.

  “When did this happen?” he asks, his voice serious, deeper, as he imagines doctors speak when they are concerned.

  “I found it two months ago, in the bath.” She drops her hair, so that the bald spot is hidden once again behind her curls. “My husband left, and I was worried. I missed him. I thought he’d never come back.”

  “Has he?”

  “Not yet.”

  Hernán nods. “And how do you feel now?”

  She answers with a shrug, and then takes off her sweater. She puts her glasses back on. “I’ve kept it hidden, and I can’t bear to look at it myself. It’s important for a woman to have beautiful hair. Clarisa says no one can see it, but I don’t believe her. What’s it like?”

  He reaches for the back of her head, searching. Her hair is so thick, it seems impossible the spot can be hidden there. “Turn around,” Hernán says, and she does.

  The rain is falling heavily now. What a sound! Hernán imagines an entire concert hall roaring in appreciation, and it’s all he can do to not stand up and take a bow. He scans the room, empty but for the two of them, swollen with noise. And maybe this explains it, Hernán thinks: why when she turns her back to him and settles into the couch—why when she leans her head forward into her chest and he runs his hand up her neck to examine the bald spot—why he feels as if he is onstage, that there are thousands of people in Clarisa’s home, all watching, wondering, waiting to see what he will do next. In truth, he’s wondering too, watching his hands—their greedy movements—as if they belong to someone else. Lena’s neck is very beautiful, and he sits close to her as she takes deep, steady breaths, her shoulders rising gently. He uses both hands to find the bald spot, kneading her head as he searches, and she moans very softly. When he finds it, he parts her brown curls, and once again examines the pink clearing. So small and sad. He bends closer to the back of her head, and kisses it. She doesn’t stop him, and so he does it again, and then to her neck, and then just below.

  The rain announces its approval.

  CONFESSIONS

  When she has gone, Hernán tidies the house, trying to understand what he feels. A little confused, a little ashamed. Physically, quite content, full of a recognizably adolescent sort of pride. He finds the scrap of paper the old man gave him stuffed between the cushions. Bingo! he reads, and wonders exactly what he’s won. These are not the sorts of things that happen to him. Lena has gone, the tidy home restored to its original appearance, and Hernán is simply bewildered. If only there was someone he could brag to, or commiserate with, he thinks, but of course, there isn’t, not here, not even back home in the city. No one would believe him. No one would care. It’s for the best, naturally. A gentleman never tells, etc., etc. He wonders what these women want from him, and what it is about this town that has made him so irresistible.

  Is it the salty sea air?

  More likely: The fact that half the men are at sea?

  Or is it simply better not to question these things?

  He lies down on the couch, meaning only to rest a moment, but when he wakes it is dark, and Clarisa is home, quietly making dinner. She hears him shift on the sofa, and moves toward him, visible only in silhouette, framed by the light of the kitchen.

  “How was your day?” she asks brightly.

  CIRCLES

  When he met Adri, she was a graduate student in biology, recently divorced, balancing single motherhood with the challenges of work. She handled it well for the most part—Aurelio’s father was only an occasional presence—but much later she confessed how hard she’d worked at first to make it all seem effortless. That’s what’s demanded of women, isn’t it? Hernán hadn’t been exactly unaware, just unable to process it all: he saw her feed the boy, bathe him, play with him, sing to him, read to him, put him to sleep. But what he didn’t (couldn’t) understand was precisely how much energy it required to do those things, do them well, and then take a deep breath and stroll from the dark bedroom, where the child slept, and into her living room, where Hernán was waiting. He didn’t (couldn’t) understand how hard it was to be fresh again, renewed, funny, attractive. He was falling in love, in the profoundly selfish way men often do. He wanted her for himself.

  Still, the most ordinary details about your new partner’s life can feel like fascinating, otherworldly discoveries—Hernán was pleased, for example, to find Adri so entertained by his stories of the drab suburb where he’d been raised. He’d describe his mother, a strong, coolly competent physician’s assistant, always on time in a country where punctuality was considered a sign of weakness, and Adri would shake her head in recognition and admiration. For her part, she would tell him what it was like being the pretty, lower-middle-class girl at the fancy upper-class private school, evoking in great detail the tedious gaggle of privileged boys in pastel sweaters who lined up to impress her with their wealth. Hernán guffawed at her descriptions of these would-be Romeos, interpreting her rejection of the suitors as a subtle kind of class war.

  It helped that neither knew much about the other’s field of study—they embarked on a project of mutual education, which not only served as the basis of their engagement, but also reminded each of them how much they enjoyed their work. Hernán was becoming an expert in the nation’s most obscure modernist poets; Adri, almost by osmosis, was too. She was studying the biology of drought-resistant crops; Hernán became, for a time, nominally conversant with the coping mechanisms of various edible plants.

  This is where they began, and it wasn’t so long ago.

  Meanwhile, the boy was a three-year-old chatterbox, clumsy, strong-willed, fearless. The first time Hernán visited the apartment where they lived, Aurelio took him by the hand, and showed him the hallway: the white walls were adorned with long colorful streaks of crayon. “Snakes,” he said. “I drew them.” A few steps farther, he stopped in front of a mess of scribbled circles, one atop the other. “Spaghetti,” he said. He was outgoing, unafraid. Nothing in Hernán’s study of poetics had prepared him for the improbable beauty of the boy’s emerging syntax. His sentences were consistently more inventive than three quarters of the chapbooks on Hernán’s shelf. He recited the alphabet with the seriousness befitting a speech before parliament. He hid his favorite toys, as if someone might take them away, and no matter how obscure the hiding place, never forgot them, not once. It hadn’t occurred to Hernán that a child so young could have so much personality. Sometimes he’d wake up with the boy sitting on his chest, a wild smile across his lips, and Hernán wo
uld wonder what he’d done to deserve such good fortune.

  It wasn’t long before Hernán had moved in.

  But the years passed, and inevitably, they were not that trio of strangers anymore, marveling at their luck; they were a family, with all the intimacy and anxiety that word implies. He hadn’t finished his dissertation, and until he did, his teaching career was stalled. Adri, more driven, more responsible, had managed to graduate, and found work teaching at a private high school. The pay was decent, but predictably enough, Hernán and Adri fought about money. They fought about Aurelio, about her ex. The winters were particularly difficult. The city felt oppressive.

  When he was six, Aurelio ran away—or so they thought for four frantic hours, until the police found him, knees pressed to his chest, hidden behind a suitcase in the farthest corner of the utility closet. Volunteers were already combing the neighborhood, but they were called off, everyone relieved and a little annoyed, while Adri and Hernán were simply embarrassed to have caused such a commotion. They were furious with the boy, but also grateful to have him back (though he’d never left). Privately, they were impressed that he’d stayed so quiet, so still, for so long. Of course, that too was concerning.

  And the more their relationship shifted, the better they got at telling their story of love at first sight. It became the sort of moment that felt choreographed by a team of sitcom writers. At a dinner party, in front of friends and strangers, around a long table dotted with empty wine bottles and full ashtrays and dirty plates waiting to be cleared, they’d be asked, and inevitably, their origin story was met with a warm, collective sigh. Often, the boy himself was present for the telling, older now, sitting on his stepfather’s lap, ready to offer commentary on the charming scene his parents were relating. “I don’t remember that,” he might say. Or: “They’re making it up.” Or: “I ran into him on purpose.” The sort of observations that only made the anecdote more touching.

  Hernán and Adri knew when their audience would laugh, when they’d express disbelief; knew when one should interrupt the other and take over the telling for maximum effect. The lunch tray no longer fell to the floor—it twisted through the air, its contents raining down on the cowering child like shrapnel. The orange juice no longer splashed on Hernán’s pants, it soaked them, drenched them. It was a flood. His shirt became a Jackson Pollock of yogurt.

  None of it was untrue per se, only magnified. It had become a story they told to reassure themselves.

  And then there came a time when they no longer told it at all, when the disconnect between the nostalgia of the story and the daily reality of their relationship had become too much to ignore.

  A PIGEON BURNS

  Hernán finds work busing tables at the Versailles, a restaurant not far from Clarisa’s boutique, a relic from the city’s more prosperous days, a large, light-filled room with high ceilings and ornate chandeliers, its walls adorned with bucolic paintings of mountain sunsets, or nostalgic depictions of nineteenth-century battles, when death was still an elegant, even aristocratic, sacrifice to offer the young nation. There’s a long wooden bar in need of a polish, but its stately bearing recalls the dining room of an old transoceanic cruise ship. When the restaurant is full, bursting with noise and conversation and laughter, when Hernán is rushing from table to crowded table, he can almost feel the room tilt, as if on a gently rolling sea.

  The pay is indecent. The manager is a little man named Holden, who fills his black suit nearly to bursting, and leads the team of waiters and cooks and busboys with a schizophrenic unpredictability. Gentle and generous in the morning, lunchtime might find him handing out insults with the depraved smile of a carnival barker. On the fourth afternoon, after the last client has been served, Holden gathers his staff and lists all the day’s errors, recalling for everyone the Versailles’s prestigious past, its traditions. The workers stand awkwardly, pretending to listen and waiting to be excused, as Holden lists a few historical figures of dubious significance who have dined at the restaurant over the course of its one hundred twenty years of uninterrupted service. Hernán is caught by surprise when one of the men—and naturally, all historical figures are men—is Carlos Max, the poet whose abbreviated oeuvre Hernán studied for his unfinished dissertation. He smiles in spite of himself—so odd that his former life would appear in such a place—and Holden interprets the smile as disrespect, so he explodes. The rest of the staff relaxes slightly—Hernán can sense it; they are relieved that Holden has chosen his target for the day, that they have each been spared. Not that Hernán minds. Next time it will be someone else, and so for now he enjoys the spectacle: the manager’s face is lined with a complex latticework of wrinkles, age heaped upon age, and as he shouts all of him reddens, even the skin beneath his thinning white hair. Hernán wonders if Holden has served in the restaurant since its halcyon days, back when the rich people of the port city still imagined they were descended from the Spanish, the French, and the English, and women struggled into petticoats as a matter of routine.

  As he daydreams, the moment ends.

  One day, there’s a fire across the street. Hernán and the rest of the staff and the buttoned-up lunchtime crowd gather on the sidewalk to watch the flames consume the top floor of the three-story building. It burns like a Roman candle, bright against the noonday sky. A tenant had kept a pigeon coop on the roof, and as the flames rise, the air is heavy with the shrill hysterics of a dozen trapped and desperately squawking birds. Traffic stops, and people pour into the streets to get a better look, while the city’s beleaguered company of volunteer firemen briefly amuse the blaze with a feeble plume of water. There’s very little left of the top floor, everything hidden by thick gray smoke, when a few pigeons finally escape. Part of the cage must have tumbled, or the mesh melted in the heat, and suddenly a handful of birds rise from the burning rooftop, and the gathered crowd sighs with relief. Then they catch sight of it, all at once: a pigeon, the last to emerge, aflame; its burning wings flail helplessly for an instant before it falls. “Aahhh,” says the crowd in a single, despairing voice. The remaining pigeons make a frantic loop around the fallen bird before disappearing in the direction of the sea.

  The restaurant closes for the afternoon, and as Hernán walks home, blocks from the fire, he is surprised to feel a fine, ashen mist float down upon him. He holds his tongue out; he tastes it. The gray-white ash coats the windows of the cars parked along the street, settles into the cracks in the sidewalk. With his index finger, he writes his name in a dusted car window. He likes the way it looks, and so he writes it again, and then a few others. Aurelio’s. Adri’s. The man he suspects may be sleeping with Adri now that he’s gone. (Not that he blames her for that.) He writes Clarisa’s name too. Not Lena’s, of course. The street is empty but for these ghosts, abruptly and needlessly conjured, and a yellow-eyed cat, skittering along the wall beside him.

  That night he mentions the fire to Clarisa. Already, she is drifting toward sleep.

  “There’s a fire every week,” she says. “You’ll get used to it.”

  He considers this, considers how much he enjoyed the quiet, powdery snowfall, the remains of the incinerated building that had so unexpectedly sprinkled his clothes and his hair and his tongue as he made his way home. He’d had no thought of the dead, injured, or displaced, only the pleasures of the spectacle and this ashy mist. Suddenly, belatedly, he feels concern, then guilt.

  “Every week? Someone should do something.”

  “All the time,” she murmurs, and a moment later is asleep.

  DOCTOR

  He’s walking home from the Versailles one day when he feels certain he’s being followed. It’s hard to say how he knows, but he knows. If this were a movie, he thinks, the background music would be tense and ominous. At every corner, he looks over his shoulder to scan the street and the crowded sidewalk behind him, but he sees only strangers. He feels silly.

  Farther up the hill, away from the c
enter of town, everything slows, and that’s when he sees her. He was right after all.

  “I’m Cristina,” she tells him, and confesses that she’s been five or ten paces behind him for blocks now. She laughs nervously.

  “Are you heading to Clarisa’s?” she asks. “Oh, of course you are.”

  “She’s at work.”

  Cristina shakes her head. “No, she told me to come by.”

  He looks her over: smiling awkwardly, wearing a not-quite-flattering yellow dress, trimmed with white. She has long, straight black hair and a leather bag over her shoulder that looks too heavy for her. Her dark eyes lock on to his, and Hernán is unwilling to argue. He offers to carry her bag for her, but she demurs.

  They head off together.

  Cristina, he notices a few blocks on, walks with a limp—a slight, barely noticeable imperfection to her gait, but now, side by side, he can hear it in the rhythm of her feet against the pavement. He’s listening for it very carefully when she says, “I’ve known Clarisa since we were girls.”

  A bus stops at the corner, exhaling a cloud of students in gray-and-white uniforms. Hernán and Cristina watch them scatter.

  “Since we were that age,” she adds.

  Hernán doesn’t answer.

  Clarisa is not, in fact, at home, but Cristina invites herself in anyway, and once inside, she sits at the kitchen table, and opens her bag to reveal a stack of papers wrapped in a rubber band. She places it on the table, then hangs the bag on the back of her wooden chair, where she sits upright, eager, full of anticipation.

  “What’s this?” Hernán asks.

  “My records.” She removes the rubber band with a long, delicate finger. “Clarisa said you were a doctor.”