The King Is Always Above the People. Daniel Alarcon

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СКАЧАТЬ he said, allowing himself to indulge briefly in description: the wide river cutting through green rolling hills that seemed to stretch on forever.

      When he was done reminiscing, he turned back to me. “Now, listen. You make my copies, and take your time. Warm up the machine, read it poetry, massage it, make love to it. Do what you have to do. You’re very lucky. I’m happy today. Tomorrow I go home and I have a job waiting for me at the bank. I’ll make good money, and I’ll marry the prettiest girl in town, and you’ll still be here, breathing this nasty city air, surrounded by these nasty city people.” He smiled for a moment. “Got that?”

      “Sure,” I said.

      “Now, tell me where a man can get a drink around here.”

      There was a bar a few streets over, a dingy spot with smoky windows that I walked by almost every day. It was a place full of sailors and dockworkers and rough men the likes of whom still frightened me. I’d never been, but in many ways, it was the bar I’d imagined when I was still back home, plotting a way to escape: dark and unpleasant and exciting, the kind of place that would upset my poor, blameless mother.

      I took the man’s target and put it behind the counter. “Sure, there’s a bar,” I said, “but it’s not for country folk.”

      “Insolent little fucker. Tell me where it is.”

      I pointed him in the right direction.

      “Half an hour. Have my copies ready.” He noticed the plastic stand with the postcards of the dictator’s hanging and scowled. With his index finger, he carefully flicked them over, so that they all tumbled to the floor.

      I let them fall.

      “If I were your father,” he said, “I would beat you senseless for disrespect.”

      He shook his head and left, letting the door slam behind him.

      I never saw him again. As it happened, I was right about the bar. Someone must have disliked the looks of him, or maybe they thought he was a cop by the way he was dressed, or maybe his accent drew the wrong kind of attention. In any case, the papers said it was quite a show. The fight started inside—who knows how these things begin—and spilled out into the street. That’s where he died, head cracked on the cobblestones. An ambulance was called, but couldn’t make it down the narrow streets in time. There was a shift change at the docks, and the streets were filled with men.

      SHORTLY AFTER MY ENCOUNTER with the security guard, I wrote a letter home. Just a note really, something brief to let my parents know I was alive, that they shouldn’t believe everything they read in the newspapers about the capital. My father had survived a stint in the city, and nearly three decades later, he still spoke of the place with bewilderment. He went there shortly after marrying my mother, and returned after a year working the docks with enough money to build the house where I’d been raised. The city may have been profitable, but it was also frightening, an unsteady kind of place. In twelve months there he saw robberies, riots, a president deposed. As soon as he had the money together, he returned home, and never went back. My mother never went at all.

      In my note I told them about the Patrices, described the nice old couple in a way that would put them both at ease. I would visit at Christmas, I promised, because it was still half a year off.

      As for the target and the dead man’s certificate, I decided to keep them. I took them home the very next day, and folded the certificate carefully into the thin pages of an illustrated dictionary the Patrices kept in their front room. I tacked the target up on my wall so that I could face it if I sat upright in bed. And one night a storm rolled in, the first downpour of the season, and the rain drumming on the roof reminded me of home. I felt suddenly lonely, and I shut my left eye, and pointed my index finger at the wall, at the man in the target. I aimed carefully and fired at him. It felt good. I did it again, this time with sound effects, and many minutes were spent this way. I blew imaginary smoke from the tip of my finger, like the gunslingers I’d seen in imported movies. I must have killed him a dozen times before I realized what I was doing, and after that, I felt a fidelity to the man in the target I could not explain. I would shoot him every night before sleeping, and sometimes in the mornings as well.

      One afternoon not long after I’d sent my letter, I came home to find the girl from my hometown—Malena was her name—red-faced and teary, in the Patrices’ tidy living room. She had just arrived from the country, and her small bag leaned against the wall by the door. Mrs. Patrice was consoling her, a gentle hand draped over Malena’s shoulder, and Mr. Patrice sat by, not quite knowing what to do. I stammered a greeting, and the three of them looked up. I read the expressions on their faces, and by the way Malena looked at me, I knew immediately what had happened.

      “Your parents send their best,” said Mrs. Patrice, her voice betraying grave disappointment.

      “You’re going to be a father,” her husband added, in case there had been any confusion.

      I stepped forward, took Malena by the hand, and led her to my room in the back without saying a word to the Patrices. For a long while we sat in silence. There had never been anyone besides me in the room, except for the first time the Patrices had shown me the place. Malena didn’t seem particularly sad or angry or happy to see me. She sat on the bed. I stood. Her hair had come undone, and fell over her face when she looked down, which, at first, was often.

      “Did you miss me?” she asked.

      I had missed her—her body, her breath, her laughter—but it wasn’t until she was in front of me that I realized it.

      “Of course,” I said.

      “You could’ve written.”

      “I did.”

      “Eventually.”

      “How long?” I asked.

      “Four months.”

      “And it’s—”

      “Yes,” Malena said in a stern voice.

      She sighed deeply, and I apologized.

      Malena had news—who else had left for the city, who had gone north. There were weddings planned for the spring, some people we knew, though not well. As I suspected, the murder of the security guard had been a big story, and Malena told me she herself hadn’t been able to sleep, wondering what I might be doing, whether I was all right. She’d visited my parents, and they’d tried to convince her not to travel to the city, or at least not alone.

      “Your father was going to come with me.”

      “And why didn’t he?” I asked.

      “Because I didn’t wait for him.”

      I sat beside her on the bed, so that our thighs were touching. I didn’t tell her that I’d met the victim, about my small role in his misfortunes, or any of that. I let her talk: she described the small, cosmetic changes that our town had undergone in the few months I’d been away. There was talk of repainting the bridge. I nodded. She was showing already, an unmistakable roundness to her. I placed the flat of my palm against her belly, and then pulled her close. She stopped talking abruptly, in mid-sentence.

      “You’ll stay with me. We’ll be happy,” I whispered.

      But Malena shook her head. СКАЧАТЬ