The King Is Always Above the People. Daniel Alarcon

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СКАЧАТЬ was still early. I stood up, and walked around the tiny room; from wall to wall, it was only ten short paces. I stared at my friend in the target. I suggested we see the neighborhood before it got too dark. I could show Malena the docks or the customs house. Didn’t she want to see it?

      “What is there to see?”

      “The harbor. The river.”

      “We have that river back home,” she said.

      We went anyway. The Patrices said nothing as we left, and when we returned in the early evening, the door to their room was closed. Malena’s bag was still by the front door, and though it was just a day bag with only one change of clothes, once I moved it, my room felt even smaller. Until that night, Malena and I had never slept in the same bed. We pressed together, and shifted our weight, and eventually we were face-to-face and very close. I put my arm around her, but kept my eyes shut, and listened to the muffled sounds of the Patrices talking anxiously.

      “Are they always so chatty?” Malena asked.

      I couldn’t make out their words, of course, but I could guess. “Does it bother you?”

      I felt Malena shrug in my arms. “Not really,” she said, “but it might if we were staying.”

      After this comment, we were quiet, and Malena slept peacefully.

      When we emerged the next morning for breakfast, my landlords were somber and unsmiling. Mrs. Patrice cleared her throat several times, making increasingly urgent gestures at her husband, until finally he set down his fork and began. He expressed his general regret, his frustration and disappointment. “We come from solid people,” he said. “We are not of the kind who tell lies for sport. We helped settle this part of the city. We are respectable people who do not accept dishonesty.”

      “We are church people,” Mrs. Patrice said.

      Her husband nodded. I had seen him prepare for services each Sunday with a meticulousness that can only come from great and unquestioned faith. A finely scrubbed suit, shirts of the most pristine white. He would comb a thick pomade into his black hair so that in the sun he was always crowned with a gelatinous shine.

      “Whatever half-truths you may have told this young lady are not our concern. That must be settled between the two of you. We have no children ourselves, but wonder how we might feel if our son was off telling everyone he was an orphan.”

      He lowered his eyebrows.

      “Crushed,” Mrs. Patrice whispered. “Betrayed.”

      “We do not doubt your basic goodness, son, nor yours …”

      “Malena,” I said. “Her name is Malena.”

      “… as you are both creatures of the one true God, and He does not err when it comes to arranging the affairs of men. It is not our place to judge, but only to accept with humility that with which the Lord has charged us.”

      He was gaining momentum now, and we had no choice but to listen. Under the table, Malena reached for my hand. Together we nodded.

      “And He has brought you both here, and so it must be His will that we look after you. And we do not mean to put you out on the streets at this delicate moment because such a thing would not be right. But we do mean to ask for an explanation, to demand one, and we will have it from you, son, and you will give it, if you are ever to learn what it means to be a respectful and respectable citizen, in this city or in any other. Tell me: Have you been studying?”

      “No.”

      “I thought not,” Mr. Patrice said. He frowned, shook his head gravely, and then continued. Our breakfast grew cold. Eventually it would be my turn to speak, but by then I had very little to say, and no desire to account for anything.

      Malena and I left that afternoon.

      I went to the shop first to arrange my affairs, and after explaining the situation to Nadal, he offered to help me. He loved doctoring official paperwork, he said. It reminded him of his finest working days. We made a copy of the original certificate and then corrected it so that the name was mine. We changed the address, the birth date, and typed the particulars of my height and weight on a beat-up Underwood Nadal had inherited from his days in customs. He whistled the whole time, clearly enjoying himself. “You’ve made an old man feel young again,” he said. We reprinted the form on bond paper, and with great ceremony, Nadal brought out a dusty box from beneath his desk. In it were the official stamps he’d pilfered over the years, more than a dozen of them, including one from the OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE PATRIOTIC FORCES OF NATIONAL DEFENSE—that is, from the dictator himself. It had a mother-of-pearl handle and an intricate and stylized version of the national seal. I’d never seen anything like it. A keepsake, Nadal told me, from an affair with an unscrupulous woman who covered him, twice weekly, in bite marks and lurid scratches, and who screamed so loudly when they made love that he often stopped just to marvel at the sound. “Like a banshee,” he said. She maintained similar liaisons with the dictator, and according to the woman, he liked to decorate her naked body with this same stamp. Nadal smiled. He could reasonably claim to have been, in his prime, extraordinarily close to the seat of power.

      “Of course, the king is dead,” Nadal said. “And me, I’m still alive.”

      Each stamp had a story like this, and he relished the telling—where it had come from, what agency it represented, how it had been used and abused over the years and to what ends. Though Malena was waiting for me, we spent nearly two hours selecting a stamp, and then we placed the forged document, and the target that I’d removed from my wall that morning, in a manila envelope. This too was sealed with a stamp.

      Nadal and I embraced. “There’ll always be a job for you here,” he said.

      Malena and I rode home that day on a groaning interprovincial bus. She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, and when I saw the city disappear and give way to the rolling plains and gentle contours of the countryside, I was not unhappy. The next morning I presented the documents at the bank in the town just across the bridge from mine. “We’ve been needing a security guard,” the manager said. “You may have heard what happened to our last one.” He blinked a lot as he spoke. “You’re young, but I like the looks of you. I don’t know why, but I like the looks of you.” And then we shook hands; I was home again.

      MY SON WAS BORN just before Christmas that year, and in March the papers began reporting a string of bank robberies in the provinces. The perpetrators were ex-convicts, or foreigners, or soldiers thrown out of work since the democratic government began downsizing the army. No one knew for certain, but it was worrisome and new, as these were the sorts of crimes that had been largely confined to the city and its poorer suburbs. Everyone was afraid, most of all me. Each report was grislier than the last. A half hour upriver, two clerks had been executed after the contents of the vault had disappointed the band of criminals. They hit two banks that day, shooting their way through a police perimeter at the second one, killing one cop and wounding another in the process. They were said to be traveling the river’s tributaries, hiding in coves along the heavily forested banks. Of course, it was only a matter of time. The bank I worked for received sizable deposits from the cement plant once a week, and many of the workers cashed their checks with us on alternate Friday afternoons.

      Malena read the papers, heard the rumors, and catalogued the increasingly violent details of each heist. I heard her tell her friends she wasn’t worried, that I was a sure shot, but in private, she was unequivocal. “Quit,” СКАЧАТЬ