The Best American Short Stories 2013 (3 page)

E
LIZABETH
S
TROUT

DANIEL ALARCÓN

FROM
Granta

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, 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 few dozen houses built on either side of the highway, with a single restaurant serving only fried fish and soda. There was 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 moto-taxi. Its front wheel spun slowly but did not 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 they and their moods were equally matched.

A boy of about eighteen stood next to me and my father. 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. “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:
Joselito, Joselito
.

A chanting; a conjuring.

The two rivals continued, more furiously now, as if 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
ooh
ed and
aah
ed, 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, 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, had 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 is for Joselito!” the little man shouted.

“No!
This
is for Joselito!” responded the other.

And so on.

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.”

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 being shaken down, small-time smugglers dispossessed of their belongings. The soldiers were adolescent and smug. Everyone paid. We would too, when it was our turn to head back to the city. This was all new, my father said, and he gripped the wheel tightly and watched with mounting concern. Or was it anger? This corruption, the only kind of commerce that had thrived during the war, was also the only kind we could always count on. Why he found it so disconcerting, I couldn’t figure. Nothing could have been more ordinary.

By nightfall we’d made it to my father’s hometown. My great-uncle’s old filling station stood at the top of the hill, under new ownership and doing brisk business now, though the truckers rarely ventured into the town proper. We eased the car onto the main street, a palm-lined boulevard that sloped down to the boardwalk, and left it a few blocks from the sea, walking until we reached the simple public square that overlooked the ocean. A larger palm tree, its trunk inscribed with the names and dates of young love, stood in the middle of this inelegant plaza. Every summer, the tree was optimistically engraved with new names and new dates, and then stood for the entire winter, untouched. I’d probably scratched a few names there myself, years before. On warm nights, when the town filled with families on vacation, the children brought out remote-control cars and guided these droning machines around the plaza, ramming them into each other or into the legs of adults, occasionally tipping them off the edge of the boardwalk and onto the beach below, and celebrating these calamities with cheerful hysteria.

My brother Francisco and I had spent entire summers like this, until the year he’d left for the U.S. These were some of my favorite memories.

But in the off-season, there was no sign of these young families. No children. They’d all gone north, back to the city or further, so of course, the arrival of one of the town’s wandering sons was both unexpected and welcome. My father and I moved through the plaza like rock stars, stopping at every bench to pay our respects, and from each of these aged men and women I heard the same thing. First: brief, rote condolences on the death of Raúl (it seemed no one much cared for him); then, a smooth transition to the town’s most cherished topic of discussion, the past. The talk was directed at me:
Your old man was so smart, so brilliant . . 
.

My father nodded, politely accepting every compliment, not the least bit embarrassed by the attention. He’d carried the town’s expectations on his shoulders for so many years, they no longer weighed on him. I’d heard these stories all my life.

“This is my son,” he’d say. “You remember Nelson?”

And one by one the old folks asked when I had come back from the United States.

“No, no,” I said. “I’m the other son.”

Of course they got us confused, or perhaps simply forgot I existed. Their response, offered gently, hopefully: “Oh, yes, the
other
son.” Then, leaning forward: “So, when will you be leaving?”

It was late summer, but the vacation season had come to an early close, and already the weather had cooled. In the distance, you could hear the hum of trucks passing along the highway. The bent men and stooped women wore light jackets and shawls and seemed not to notice the sound. It was as if they’d all taken the same cocktail of sedatives, content to cast their eyes toward the sea, the dark night, and stay this way for hours. Now they wanted to know when I’d be leaving.

I wanted to know too.

“Soon,” I said.

“Soon,” my father repeated.

Even then I had my doubts, but I would keep believing this for another year or so.

“Wonderful,” responded the town. “Just great.”

My father and I settled in for the night at my great-uncle’s house. It had that stuffiness typical of shuttered spaces, of old people who live alone, made more acute by the damp ocean air. The spongy foam mattresses sagged and there were yellowing photographs everywhere—in dust-covered frames, in unruly stacks, or poking out of the books that lined the shelves of the living room. My father grabbed a handful and took them to the kitchen. He set the water to boil, flipping idly through the photographs and calling out names of the relatives in each picture as he passed them along. There was a flatness to his voice, a distance—as if he were testing his recall, as opposed to reliving any cherished childhood memory. You got the sense he barely knew these people.

He handed me a small black-and-white image with a matt finish, printed on heavy card stock with scalloped edges. It was a group shot taken in front of this very house, back when it was surrounded by fallow land, the bare, undeveloped hillside. Perhaps twenty blurred faces.

“Besides a few of the babies,” my father said, “everyone else in this photo is dead.”

For a while we didn’t speak.

A bloom of mold grew wild on the kitchen wall, bursting black and menacing from a crack in the cement. To pass the time, or change the subject, we considered the mold’s shape, evocative of something, but we couldn’t say what. A baby carriage? A bull?

“Joselito’s moto-taxi,” my father said.

And this was, in fact, exactly what it resembled.

“May he rest in peace,” I added.

My father had been quiet for most of the trip—coming home always did this to him—but he spoke up now. Joselito, he said, must have been a real character. Someone special. He hadn’t seen an outpouring of emotion like that in many years, not since he was a boy.

“It was an act,” I said, and began to explain my theory.

My old man interrupted me. “But what isn’t?”

What he meant was that people perform sorrow for a reason. For example: no one was performing it for Raúl. My great-uncle had been mayor of this town when my father was a boy, had owned the filling station, and sired seven children with five different women, none of whom he bothered to marry. He’d run the town’s only radio station for a decade and paid from his own pocket to pave the main boulevard, so he could drive in style. Then in the late 1980s, Raúl lost most of his money and settled into a bitter seclusion. I remembered him only for his bulbous nose and his hatred of foreigners, an expansive category in which he placed anyone who wasn’t originally from the town and its surrounding areas. Raúl’s distrust of the capital was absolute. I was eleven the last time I saw him, and I don’t think he ever eyed me with anything but suspicion.

It was easier to talk about Joselito than about my great-uncle. More pleasant, perhaps. This town brought up bad memories for my father, who was, in those days, entering a pensive late middle age. That was how it seemed to me at the time, but what does a twenty-two-year-old know about a grown man’s life and worries? I was too young to recognize what would later seem more than obvious: that I was the greatest source of my old man’s concern. That if he were growing old too soon, I was at least partly to blame. This would’ve been clear, had I been paying attention.

My father shifted the conversation. He brought the tea out and asked me what I planned to do when I got to California. This was typical of the time, a speculative game we were fond of playing. We assumed it was fast approaching, the date of my departure; later, I would think we’d all been pretending.

“I don’t know,” I said.

I’d spent so much time imagining it—my leaving, my preparations, my victory lap around the city, saying goodbye and good luck to all those who’d be staying behind—but what came after contained few specifics. I’d get off the plane, and then . . . Francisco, I guess, would be there. He’d drive me across the Bay Bridge to Oakland and introduce me to his life there, whatever that might be. From time to time, when curiosity seized me, I searched for this place online and found news items that helped me begin to envision it: shootings mostly, but also minor political scandals involving graft or misused patronage or a city official with liens on his property; occasionally something really exciting, like an oil tanker lost in fog and hitting a bridge, or the firebombing of a liquor store by one street gang or another. There’d even been a minor riot not too long before, with the requisite smashed windows, a dumpster in flames, and a set of multiracial anarchists wearing bandannas across their faces so that all you could see in the photos were their alert and feral eyes; and I’d wondered then how my brother had chosen to live in a city whose ambience so closely mimicked our own. Could it really be an accident of geography? Or was it some latent homing instinct?