The King Is Always Above the People. Daniel Alarcon
did you do?” he asked, blinking. “Is this Mexico?”
It seemed very real, what I felt: that truck had, through mechanical intuition, decided to blow a tire for me, to force me to stop. I turned on the cabin light. “How long has it been since you stopped loving me?”
“Really?” he asked.
I nodded.
“What month is this?” Hank said desperately.
I didn’t budge.
“Are you going to leave me here?”
“Yes,” I said.
He smiled, as if this were a moment for smiling. “I’m not getting out. I paid for this truck.”
“No you didn’t,” I said.
“Still,” he shrugged, “I’m not getting out.”
Which was fine. Which was perfect. There was a spare in the back, but it was flat too. If one must begin again late in life, better to do so cleanly, nakedly. I left the keys in the ignition. Out here, outside our small city, the air had cooled and I breathed it in. Life is very long. It had been years, but I recognized the feeling immediately. It wasn’t the first time I’d found myself on a dark highway, on foot, with nowhere to go.
I’D BEEN OUT OF THE CONSERVATORY for about a year when my great-uncle Raúl died. We missed the funeral, but my father asked me to drive down the coast with him a few days later, to attend to some of the postmortem details. The house had to be closed up, signed over to a cousin. There were a few boxes to sift through as well, but no inheritance or anything like that.
I was working at the copy shop in the Old City, trying out for various plays, but my life was such that it wasn’t hard to drop everything and go. Rocío wanted to come along, but I thought it’d be nice for me and my old man to travel together. We hadn’t done that in a while. We left the following morning, a Thursday. A few hours south of the capital, the painted slums thinned, and our conversation did too, and we took in the desolate landscape with appreciative silence. Everything was dry: the silt-covered road, the dirty white sand dunes, somehow even the ocean. Every few kilometers, there rose out of this moonscape a billboard for soda or beer or suntan lotion, its colors faded since the previous summer, its edges unglued and flapping in the wind. This was years ago, before the beaches were transformed into private residences for the wealthy, before the ocean was fenced off and the highway pushed back, away from the land’s edge. Back then, the coast survived in a state of neglect, and one might pass the occasional fishing village, or a filling station, or a rusting pyramid of oil drums stacked by the side of the road, a hitchhiker, perhaps a laborer, or a woman and her child strolling along the highway with no clear destination. But mostly you passed nothing at all. The monotonous landscape gave you a sense of peace, all the more because it came so soon after the city had ended.
We stopped for lunch at a beach town four hours south of the capital, just a couple dozen houses built on either side of the highway, with a single restaurant serving only fried fish and soda. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about the place, except that after lunch we happened upon the last act of a public feud: two local men, who might’ve been brothers or cousins or best of friends, stood outside the restaurant, hands balled in tight fists, shouting at each other in front of a tipped-over mototaxi. Its front wheel spun slowly, but did not stop. It refused to stop. It was like a perpetual motion machine. The passenger cage was covered with heavy orange plastic, and painted on the side was the word JOSELITO.
And I wondered: Which of these two men is Joselito?
The name could’ve fit either of them. The more aggressive of the pair was short and squat, his face rigid with fury. His reddish eyes had narrowed to tiny slits. He threw wild punches and wasted vast amounts of energy, moving like a spinning top around his antagonist. His rival, both taller and wider, started off with a look of bemused wonder, almost embarrassment, but the longer the little one kept at it, the more his expression darkened, so that within minutes, their moods were equally matched.
Perhaps ownership of this name was precisely what they were arguing about, I thought. The wheel clicked at every rotation, and though I knew it was impossible, I was certain it was getting louder each time. The longer that front wheel kept spinning, the more disconcerted I became. The combatants danced around each other, now lunging, now retreating, both deeply committed to resolving the issue—whatever it might be—right then, right there.
A boy of about eighteen stood next to my father and me. With crossed arms, he observed the proceedings as if it were a horse race on which he’d wagered a very small sum. He wore no shoes, and his feet were dusted with sand. Though it wasn’t particularly warm, he’d been swimming. I ventured a question.
“Which one is Joselito?” I asked.
He looked at me like I was crazy. He had a fuzzy blue name tattooed on his forearm, blurred and impossible to read. His girlfriend’s name? His mother’s?
“Don’t you know?” he said in a low voice. “Joselito’s dead.”
I nodded, as if I’d known, as if I’d been testing him, but by then the name of the dead man was buzzing around the gathered circle of spectators, whispered from one man to the next, to a child, then to his mother, so that it seemed, for a moment, that the entire town was humming it: “Joselito, Joselito.”
A chanting; a conjuring.
The two rivals continued, more furiously now. The mention of the dead man had animated them, or freed some brutal impulse within them. The smaller one landed a right hook to the bigger man’s jaw, and this man staggered, but did not fall. The crowd oohed and aahed, and it was only then that the two fighters realized they were being watched. I mean, they’d known it all along, of course; they must have. But when the crowd reached a certain mass, the whispering a certain volume, with all these many eyes fixed upon the arguing men—then everything changed. It could not have been more staged if they’d been fighting in an amphitheater, with an orchestra playing behind them. It was something I’d been working out myself, in my own craft: how the audience affects a performance, how differently we behave when we know we are being watched. True authenticity, I’d decided, required an absolute, nearly spiritual denial of the audience, or even of the possibility of being watched; but here, something true, something real, quickly morphed into something fake. It happened instantaneously, on a sandy street in this anonymous town: we were no longer accidental observers of an argument, but the primary reason for its existence. This awareness on the part of the protagonists served to alter and magnify their behavior, their gestures, and their expressions of anger. The scene was suddenly more dramatic, their taunts more carefully phrased, more pointed.
“This is for Joselito!” the little man shouted.
“No! This is for Joselito!” responded the other.
And so on.
The crowd cheered them both without prejudice. Or perhaps they were cheering the dead man. Whatever the case, soon blood was drawn, lips swollen, eyes blackened. And still the wheel spun. My father and I watched with rising anxiety—someone might die! Why won’t that wheel stop!—until, to our relief, a town elder rushed through the crowd and pushed the two men apart. He was frantic. He stood between them, arms spread like wings, a flat palm pressed to each man’s chest as they leaned steadily into him.
This too was part of the act.
“Joselito’s father,” said the barefoot young man. “Just in time.”
“Naturally,” I said.
We left and drove south for another hour before coming to a stretch of luxurious new asphalt, so smooth it felt like the car might be able to pilot itself. The tension washed away, and we were happy again, until we found ourselves trapped amid the thickening swarm of trucks headed to the border. We saw northbound traffic being inspected, drivers