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Let’s say you wonder if your sister paid for what you did. Now you’re sending out messages, lists of people you want executed. You don’t know who did it, so you want them all dead. You want to see bodies stacked up high, a monument to the pain you’re feeling.
Let’s say you want to murder the world.
And then one of the men is caught and tried, and sentenced to death. And one day you see him, across the yard, separated by two fences, and you get him a message. One day, you tell him, after the system kills you, I’ll get out. And I’m going to kill your family. You mean it. He knows you mean it, and that’s the only satisfaction you have.
Let’s say every time you come across someone inside, someone who hurt a child, you think of him. And you make them pay.
But the other man who killed Renee and Nancy gets away. Let’s say his name is Reyes. He gets away and stays away. Let’s say he vanishes somewhere in Mexico.
One decade, two decades, three. Reyes has a life. He gets married. He has children. He’s divorced. He marries again.
And all that time, while the man who raped and murdered your sister is walking the streets, you’re in prison, and your hatred is something sharp in your chest. Something darker, more toxic than rage. You don’t let your family call you. You don’t let them reach you. This is something you have to do alone.
3
Let’s say sometime during your second decade in prison you begin to think about the true meanings of simple words. Words like compassion. Understanding. Consideration. Forgiveness. Simple words.
No one you grew up with could have defined any of them.
Let’s say one night, on the block, you wake up wondering who you are. What right you have to hurt anyone. Is this an eye for an eye? Didn’t you take a life?
You ask yourself why you turned out the way you did, but you know you’ll never arrive at a satisfying answer. But let’s say you resolve to stumble on.
Let’s say in 2012 you’re released. All told, you’ve spent thirty-two years inside.
Let’s say you emerge into a world that’s disappointingly familiar. Your town is the same, only more so. The violence you loosed has become routine, and the kids have learned from you. Perfected what you taught them. Your mother’s dead. Your homies are dead. Some of your brothers have died too.
You go around town and tell everyone you’ve hurt that they don’t need to be afraid of you anymore. It’s a long list. You visit the mother of the boy you killed.
The last time you saw her was in the courtroom, when you were on trial for the murder of her son. Now she has salt-and-pepper hair, and sits in an armchair, both her hands resting atop a cane, her head bent down toward the floor. She’s still afraid of you. You get on one knee, and with all your might you give her an explanation of why you did what you did.
You don’t ask for forgiveness. You accept responsibility. When you’re done, she clears her throat, and says that no one in her family had anything to do with Renee’s death.
She’s afraid of you.
She says she’s seen you in the neighborhood talking to the youngsters. She knows you’re trying to make amends. Then she says she forgives you. It takes your breath away.
Then she changes the subject: “What else have you been doing?” she asks.
“Construction,” you say.
“So do you know how to fix cabinets?”
“Yeah, señora.”
“That’s good, mijo. Do you know how to fix fences?”
“Yeah, señora.”
“That’s good, mijo,” she says. “So now you’re gonna fix my cabinet and my fence.”
4
And then you get a call. Alfredo Reyes has been caught. Before you know it, they’ve brought him back from Mexico, and the trial has begun.
Let’s say you weren’t prepared to see the paunchy, middle-aged man before you, his slouch, his thinning hair. He tells the court that no, he never spent much time thinking of Renee or Nancy. Very rarely did he remember what he’d done.
You spent decades inside remembering what he did.
“It was consensual anyway,” Reyes tells the court, and your heart rate quickens.
“It was the other guy who killed those girls,” he says, and you clench your fists.
But you aren’t the person you were. And still. Let’s say you spent years dreaming of killing this man. And now you’ve sat through weeks of his trial, watching him. Thinking, repeating to yourself: Compassion. Understanding. Consideration. Forgiveness.
These words you’ve taught yourself. Words that suddenly seem meaningless again.
And then you find yourself, at your sister’s grave site, full of rage. And then you find yourself climbing a wall across the street from the courthouse, and up a ladder, to the roof of an old theater. Let’s say from here you can see the garage where the bus pulls in from the county jail. From here you could have a clean shot.
He says it was consensual. He described it.
And let’s say you find yourself on the roof, holding a rifle, the feel of it like an old friend. Let’s say you can imagine the bullet hitting Reyes, and the image of him falling is so clear in your mind, it’s like a movie you’ve watched a thousand times.
You’re watching, you’re waiting for the bus to come.
What happened on the roof of that theater?
Let’s say you saw the man you used to be.
THE KING IS ALWAYS ABOVE THE PEOPLE (#ulink_d9064cbc-a638-5134-bcd0-201985c8f008)
IT WAS THE YEAR I left my parents, a few useless friends, and a girl who liked to tell everyone we were married, and moved two hundred kilometers downstream to the capital. Summer had limped to a close. I was nineteen years old and my idea was to work the docks, but when I showed up the man behind the desk said I looked scrawny, that I should come back when I had put on some muscle. I did what I could to hide my disappointment. I’d dreamed of leaving home since I was a boy, since my mother taught me that our town’s river flowed all the way to the city. My father had warned me, but still, I’d never expected to be turned away.
I rented a room in the neighborhood near the port, from Mr. and Mrs. Patrice, an older couple who had advertised for a student. They were prim and serious, and they showed me the rooms of their neat, uncluttered house as if it were the private viewing of a diamond. Mine would be the back room, they said. There were no windows. After the brief tour we sat in the living room, sipping tea, beneath a portrait of the old dictator that hung above the mantel. They asked me what I was studying. All I could think of in those days was money, so I said economics. They liked that answer. They asked about my parents, and when I said they had passed on, that I was all alone, I saw Mrs. Patrice’s wrinkled hand graze her husband’s thigh, just barely.
He offered to lower the rent, and I accepted.
The next day Mr. Patrice recommended me to an acquaintance who needed a cashier for a shop he owned. It was good part-time work, he told me, perfect for a student. I was hired. It wasn’t far from the port, and in warm weather, I could sit out front and smell the river where it opened into the wide harbor. It was enough for me to listen and know it was there: the hum and crash of ships being loaded and unloaded reminded me of why I had left, where I had come to, and all the farther places that awaited me. I tried not to think of home, and though I’d promised to write, somehow it never seemed like the appropriate time.
We sold cigarettes and liquor and newspapers to the dockworkers, and had a copy machine for those who came to present their paperwork at the customs house. We made change for them and my boss, Nadal, advised those headed to customs as to the appropriate bribe, depending on what item they were expecting to receive, and from where. He knew the protocol well. He’d worked for years in customs before the dictator fell, but hadn’t had the foresight to join a political party when democracy came. His only other mistake in thirty years, he told me once, was that he hadn’t stolen enough. There had never been any rush. Autocracies are nothing if not stable, and no one ever thought the old regime could be toppled.
We sold postcards of the hanging, right by the cash register: the body of the dictator, swaying from an improvised gallows in the main plaza. In the photo, it is a cloudy day, and every head is turned upward to face the expressionless dead man. The card’s inscription reads The King Is Always Above the People, and one has the sense of an inviolable silence reigning over the spectators. I was fifteen when it happened. I remember my father crying at the news. He’d been living in the city when the man first came to power.
We sold two or three of these postcards each week.
In the early mornings I wandered around the city. Out in the streets, I peppered my speech with words and phrases I’d heard around me, and sometimes, when I fell into conversations with strangers, I would realize later that the goal of it all had been to pass for someone raised in the capital. I never pulled it off. The slang I’d picked up from the radio before moving was disappointingly tame. At the shop I saw the same people every day, and they knew my story—or rather, the one I told them: a solitary, orphaned student from a faraway city neighborhood. “When do you study?” they’d ask, and I’d tell them I was saving up money to matriculate. I spent a good deal of time reading, and this fact alone was enough to convince them. The stooped customs bureaucrats in their faded suits came in on their lunch break to reminisce with Nadal about the good old days, and sometimes they would slip me some money. “For your studies,” they’d say, and wink.
There were others—the dockworkers, always promising the newest, dirtiest joke in exchange for credit at the store. Twice a month one of the larger carriers came in, depositing a dozen or so startled Filipinos for shore leave. Inevitably they wandered into the shop, disoriented, hopeful, but most of all thrilled to be once again on dry land. They grinned and yammered incomprehensibly and I was always kind to them. That could be me, I thought, in a year, perhaps two: stumbling forth from the bowels of a ship into the narrow streets of a port city anywhere in the world.
I was alone in the shop one afternoon when a man in a light brown uniform walked in. I’d been in the city three and a half months by then. He wore his moustache in that way men from the provinces did, and I disliked him immediately. With great ceremony he pulled a large piece of folded paper from the inside pocket of his jacket and spread it out on the counter. It was a target from a shooting range: the crude outline of a man, vaguely menacing, now pierced with holes. The customer looked admiringly at his handiwork. “Not bad, eh?”
“Depends.” I bent over the sheet, placing my index finger in each paper wound, one by one. There were seven holes in the target. “What distance?”
“At any distance.” He asked, “Can you do better?” Without waiting for me to respond, he took out an official-looking form and placed it next to the bullet-riddled paper man. “I need three copies, son. This target and my certificate. Three of each.”
“Half an hour,” I said.
He squinted at me and stroked his moustache. “Why so long?”
The reason, naturally, was that I felt like making him wait. And he knew that. But I told him the machine had to warm up. Even as I said this, it sounded ridiculous. The machine, I said, was a delicate and expensive piece of equipment, newly imported from Japan.
He was unconvinced.
“And we don’t have paper this size,” I added. “I’ll have to reduce it.”
His lips scrunched together into a sort of smile. “But thank God you have a new machine that can do all that. You’re from upriver, aren’t you?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Which village?”
“Town,” I said, and told him the name.
“Have you seen the new bridge?” he asked.
I said I hadn’t, and this was a lie. “I left before it was built.”
He sighed. “It’s a beautiful bridge,” 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.
