The Best American Short Stories 2013

DANIEL ALARCÓN The Provincials

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 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, 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?

What it all had to do with me was never quite clear. Where I would fit in. What I would do with myself once I was there. These were among the many questions that remained. The visa, whenever it came, would not arrive with life instructions. Nor would it obligate me to stay in Oakland, of course, and I had considered other alternatives, though none very seriously, and all based on a whimsical set of readings and the occasional Internet search: Philadelphia, I liked for its history; Miami, for its tropical ennui; Chicago, for its poets; Los Angeles, for its sheer size.

But one can start over in any number of places, right? Any number of times?

“I’ll get a job,” I told my father. “Isn’t that what Americans do?”

“It’s what everyone does. In a copy shop?”

“I’m an actor.”

“Who makes photocopies.”

I frowned. “So I’ll make photocopies my entire life. Why not?”

He wanted me to study because that was what he’d wanted for himself so many years before. And for Francisco too. He’d hoped my brother would be a professor by now, an academic, though he was far too proud ever to share this disappointment with me. He had his own issues with me: his unbounded respect for playwrights and artists and writers was completely abstract; on a more concrete level, he wished I’d considered some more reliable way to earn a living. As for my day job, my mother told me once that seeing me work as the attendant at the copy shop made my old man sad. His sadness, in turn, made me angry. His politics affirmed that all work held an inherent dignity. This was what he’d always repeated, but of course no ideology can protect a son from the unwelcome inheritance of his father’s ambitions.

“When I was a boy,” my old man said, “this town was the middle of nowhere. It still is, I know. But imagine it before they re-routed the highway. We knew there was something else out there—another country to the south, the capital to the north—but it felt very far away.”

“It was.”

“You’re right. It was. We were hours from civilization. Six or seven to the border, if not more. But the roads were awful. And spiritually—it was even farther. It required a certain kind of imagination to see it.”

I smiled. I thought I was making him laugh, but really, I was just trying to close off the conversation, shut it down before it headed somewhere I didn’t want it to go. “I’ve always been very imaginative,” I said.

My old man knew what I was doing, even if I didn’t.

“Yes, son. You have. Maybe not imaginative enough, though.”

I didn’t want to ask him what he meant, so I sat, letting the silence linger until it forced him to answer my unspoken question.

“I’m sorry,” my old man said. “I wonder if you’ve thought much about your future, that’s all.”

“Sure I have. All the time.”

“To the exclusion of thinking about your present?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“What would you say?”

I paused, attempting to strip my voice of any anger before I spoke. “I’ve thought a great deal about my future, so that my present could seem more livable.”

He nodded slowly. We sipped carefully from our steaming cups. For once, I was grateful for my old man’s obsession with tea—it allowed us to pause, gather our thoughts. It excused us from having to talk, and the danger of saying things we might not mean.

“You and Rocío seem well.”

I never spoke about my relationships with my parents.

“Sure. We’re doing fine.”

There was something else he wanted to ask me, I could tell, but he didn’t. He narrowed his eyes, thinking, and then something changed in his face—a slackness emerged, the edges of his mouth dropped. He’d given up.

“I always hated this house,” my old man said after a few minutes. “I can’t imagine that anyone would want it. We should bulldoze the thing and be done with it.”

It was all the same to me, and I told him so. We could set it on fire, or shatter every last brick with a sledgehammer. I had no attachments to this place, to this town. My father did, but he preferred not to think about them. It was a place to visit with a heavy heart, when an old relative died. Or with your family on holiday, if such a luxury could be afforded. Francisco, it occurred to me, might feel the same way toward the city where we’d been raised.

“I’ve let you down,” my old man said. His voice was timid, hushed, as if he hadn’t wanted me to hear.

“Don’t say that.”

“We should have pushed you harder, sent you away sooner. Now…” He didn’t finish, but I understood that now, in his estimation, was far too late.

“It’s fine.”

“I know it is. Everyone’s fine. I’m fine, you’re fine, your mother’s fine too. Even Francisco is fine, or so the rumor goes, God bless the U.S.A. Everything is fine. Just ask the mummies sitting on the benches out there. They spend every evening telling the same five stories again and again, but if you ask them, they’ll respond with a single voice that everything is just fine. What do we have to complain about?”

“I’m not complaining,” I said.

“I know you aren’t. That’s precisely what concerns me.”

I slumped, feeling deflated. “I’ll leave when the visa comes. I can’t leave before that. I can’t do anything before that.”

My father winced. “But it isn’t entirely accurate to say you can’t do anything, is it?”

“I suppose not.”

“Consider this: what if it doesn’t come? Or what if it comes at an inconvenient time. Let’s say you’re in love with Rocío—”

“Let’s suppose.”

“And she doesn’t want to leave. So then you stay. What will you do then?”

He was really asking: What are you doing right now?

When I didn’t say anything, he pressed further, his voice rising in pitch. “Tell me, son. Are you sure you even want that visa? Are you absolutely certain? Do you know yet what you’re going to do with your life?”

We were determined not to shout at each other. Eventually, he went to bed, and I left the house for a walk along the town’s desolate streets, where there was not a car to be seen, nor a person. You could hear the occasional truck roaring by in the distance, but fewer at this hour, like a sporadic wind. It looked like an abandoned stage set, and I wondered: who’s absolutely certain about anything? I found a pay phone not far from the plaza and called Rocío. I wanted her to make me laugh, and I sighed with relief when she answered on the first ring, as if she’d been waiting for my call. Maybe she had. I told her about the drive, about the fight we witnessed, about my great-uncle’s dank and oppressive house, filled with pictures of racehorses and marching bands and the various women who’d borne his children and had their hopes and their hearts shattered. I didn’t tell her about the conversation with my father.

“I’ve taken a lover,” Rocío said, interrupting.

It was a game we played; I tried to muster the energy to play along. I didn’t want to disappoint her. “And what’s he like?”

“Handsome, in an ugly sort of way. Crooked nose, giant cock. More than adequate.”

“I’m dying of jealousy,” I said. “Literally dying. The life seeps from my tired body.”

“Did you know that by law, if a man finds his wife sleeping with another man on their marriage bed, he’s allowed to murder them both?”

“I hadn’t heard that. But what if he finds them on the couch?”

“Then he can’t kill them. Legally speaking.”

“So did you sleep with him on our bed?”

“Yes,” Rocío answered. “Many, many times.”

“And was his name Joselito?”

There was quiet. “Yes. That was his name.”

“I’ve already had him killed.”

“But I just saw him this morning.”

“He’s gone, baby. Say goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” she whispered.

I was satisfied with myself. She asked me about the town, and I told her that everyone confused me with my brother. So many years separated my family from this place that they’d simply lost track of me. There was room in their heads for only one son; was it any surprise they chose Francisco?

“Oh, that’s so sad!” Rocío said. She was mocking me.

“I’m not telling you so you’ll feel sorry for me.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know,” she said, drawing out the syllable in a way she probably thought was cute, but which just annoyed me.

“I’m hanging up now.” The phone card was running out anyway.

“Goodnight, Joselito,” Rocío said, and blew a kiss into the receiver.

We spent a few hours the next morning in my great-uncle’s house, sifting through the clutter, in case there was anything we might want to take back with us. There wasn’t. My father set some items aside for the soldiers, should it come to that; nothing very expensive, but things he thought might look expensive if you were a bored young man with a rifle who’d missed all the action by a few years, and were serving your time standing by the side of a highway, collecting tributes: a silver picture frame; an antique camera in pristine condition; an old but very ornate trophy, which would surely come back to life with a little polish. It didn’t make much sense, of course; these young men wanted one of two things, I told my father: cash or electronics. Sex, perhaps, but probably not with us. Anything else was meaningless. My father agreed.

Our unfinished conversation was not mentioned.

After lunch, we headed into town. There was some paperwork to be filed in order to transfer Raúl’s property over to a distant cousin of ours, an unmarried woman of fifty who still lived nearby and might have some use for the house. Raúl’s children wanted nothing, refused, on principle, to be involved. My father was dreading this transfer, of course, not because he was reluctant to give up the property, but because he was afraid of how many hours this relatively simple bureaucratic chore might require. But he hadn’t taken his local celebrity into account, and of course we were received at city records with the same bright and enthusiastic palaver with which we’d been welcomed in the plaza the night before. We were taken around to greet each of the dozen municipal employees, friendly men and women of my father’s generation and older who welcomed the interruption because they quite clearly had nothing to do. It was just like evenings in the plaza, I thought, only behind desks and under fluorescent lights. Many of them claimed some vague familial connection to me, especially the older ones, and so I began calling them all uncle and auntie just to be safe. Again and again I was mistaken for Francisco—When did you get back? Where are you living now?—and I began to respond with increasingly imprecise answers, so that finally, when we’d made it inside the last office, the registrar of properties, I simply gave in to this assumption, and said, when asked: “I live in California.”

It felt good to say it. A relief.

The registrar was a small, very round man named Juan, with dark skin and a raspy voice. He’d been my father’s best friend in third grade, or so he claimed. My old man didn’t bother to contradict him, only smiled in such a way that I understood it to be untrue; or if not untrue exactly, then one of those statements that time had rendered unverifiable, and about which there was no longer any use debating.

The registrar liked my answer. He loosened his tie and clapped his hands. “California! Oh, my! So what do you do there?”

My father gave me a once-over. “Yes,” he said now. “Tell my old friend Juan what you do.”

I thought back to all those letters my brother had written, all those stories of his I’d read and nearly memorized in my adolescence. It didn’t matter, of course; I could have told Juan any number of things: about my work as a ski instructor, or as a baggage handler, or as a bike-repair technician. I could have told him the ins and outs of Wal-Mart, about life in American small towns, about the shifting customs and mores of different regions of the vast United States. The accents, the landscapes, the winters. Anything I said at that moment would’ve worked just fine. But I went with something simple and current, guessing correctly that Juan wasn’t much interested in details. There were a few facts I knew about my brother, in spite of the years and the distance: a man named Hassan had taken him under his wing. They were in business together, selling baby formula and low-priced denim and vegetables that didn’t last more than a day. The details were arcane to me, but it was a government program, which, somehow, was making them both very rich.

“I work with an Arab,” I said. “We have a store.”

The registrar nodded severely, as if processing this critical information. “The Arabs are very able businessmen,” he said finally. “You must learn everything you can from this Arab.”

“I intend to.”

“So you can be rich!”

“That’s the idea,” I said.

A smile flashed across Juan’s face. “And the American girls? Ehhhhh?”

His voice rose with this last drawn-out syllable, so that it sounded like the thrum of a small revving motor.

I told him what he wanted to hear, in exactly the sly tone required. “They’re very affectionate.”

Juan clapped again. “Wonderful! Wonderful! These young people,” he said to my father. “The whole world is right there for them, just ripe for the taking. Tell me, are you happy, young man?”

I had to remind myself he was addressing that version of me that lived in California, that worked with Hassan, the one who was going to be unspeakably wealthy as a result. Not the me who’d never left the country, who wanted to be an actor but was actually a part-time employee in a copy shop run by a depressive.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m very happy.”

Juan smiled broadly, and I knew my part in the conversation was over. He and my father got down to business. The paperwork was prepared, a long stack of forms and obtusely worded declarations, all signed in triplicate, and in a matter of minutes, my great-uncle’s house was officially no longer our problem. I stood when my father did. Juan took my hand and shook it vigorously.

“California!” he said again, as if he didn’t quite believe it.

Once we were free of Juan and the municipal offices, outside again and breathing the briny, life-giving sea air, I congratulated my old man. I said: “Now we don’t have to burn the house down.”

He gave me a weary look. “Now we can’t, you mean.”

We walked toward the plaza. It was late afternoon, still hours of light remaining, but where else could one go in this town? The regulars would be in their habitual spots, waiting for the sunset with steadfast, unflagging patience. It had been barely a day, but already I could understand why my father had fled this place the moment he had the chance. He’d gone first to the provincial capital, a nice enough place that he began to outgrow the moment he arrived. He was young; he wanted more. He moved to the capital itself, where he finished his education, won more prizes, married, and went abroad, fulfilling, if only partially, the expectations of those he’d left behind. They’d wanted him to be a judge, or a diplomat, or an engineer. To build bridges or make law. His actual job—head librarian of the antiquarian books and rare manuscripts section of the National Library—was a wholly inconceivable occupation. It sounded less like work one did for a wage, and more like an inherited title of nobility. But then it was precisely the rarefied nature of his position that gave my father such prestige in these parts.

We hadn’t gone far when he said, “Quite the act in there.”

I was feeling good and opted not to listen for any trace of sarcasm. Instead I thanked him.

“An Arab?” he said. “A store? How precise!”

“Everything’s an act, right? I was improvising. You have to say the lines like you mean them.”

“I see your studies at the conservatory have really paid dividends. It was very convincing.”

“Your best friend thought so.”

“Best friend, indeed,” my old man said. “I suppose it’s obvious, but I have no memory of him.”

I nodded. “I don’t think he noticed, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

We still hadn’t returned to the discussion of the previous night, and now there seemed no point. Instead we’d come to the plaza, with its view of the sea and its benches filling up one by one. We ducked into a tiny restaurant, hoping to have a quiet meal alone, but everyone recognized my father, and so the basic ritual of our stay in town began anew. We entered the dining room, waving, accepting greetings. A few men called my father’s name excitedly—Manuel! Manolito!—and by the way his face shifted, the way his eyes darkened, I could see this prominence beginning to weigh on him. I saw him draw a deep breath, as if preparing for a steep climb. He was bored with it all, though every instinct told him he must bury this cynicism, ignore it. There are no cynics in this town—that is something you learn when you travel. When you live in the capital and become corrupt. One cannot be rude to these people, one cannot make fun of them. They know almost nothing about you anymore, but they love you. And this was the bind my old man was in. The night demanded something, some way to shift its course; and perhaps this was why, when we approached the table that had called us, he threw an arm over my shoulder, squeezed me tightly, and introduced me as his son, Nelson, home from abroad.

“From California,” my father said. “Just back for a visit.”

His announcement caught me by surprise. I hadn’t intended to reprise the role debuted in Juan’s office, but now there was no choice. I scarcely had a moment to glance in my old man’s direction, to catch sight of his playful smile, before a couple of strangers wrapped me in a welcoming embrace. Everything happened quite quickly. A few narrow wooden tables were pushed together; my father and I pressed into perversely straight-backed chairs. We were surrounded. Everyone wanted to say hello; everyone wanted to get a look at me. I shook a dozen hands, grinning the entire time like a politician. I felt very grateful to my old man for this opportunity. It was—how do I explain this?—the role I’d been preparing for my entire life.

Scene: A dim restaurant off the plaza, in a small town on the southern coast. Santos (fifteen or twenty years older than the others, whom they call Profe) and his protégé, Cochocho, do most of the talking; Erick and Jaime function as a chorus and spend most of their energy drinking. They’ve been at it all afternoon when an old friend, Manuel, arrives with his son, Nelson. It is perhaps two hours before dark. Manuel lives in the capital, and his son is visiting from the United States. The young man is charming but arrogant, just as they expect all Americans to be. As the night progresses, he begins to grate on them, something evident at first only in small gestures. Bottles of beer are brought to the table, the empties are taken away, a process as fluid and automatic as the waves along the beach. How they are drained so quickly is not entirely clear. It defies any law of physics. The waitress, Elena, is an old friend too, a heavyset woman in her late forties, dressed in sweatpants and a loose-fitting T-shirt; she observes these men with a kind of pity. Over the years, she has slept with all of them. A closely guarded secret; they are men of ordinary vanity, and each of the four locals thinks he is the only one. Elena’s brown-haired daughter, Celia, is a little younger than the American boy—he’s in his early twenties—and she lingers in the background, trying to catch a glimpse of the foreigner. Her curiosity is palpable. There are dusty soccer trophies above the bar, and a muted television, which no one watches. Occasionally the on-screen image lines up with the dialogue, but the actors are not aware of this.

NELSON: That’s right. California. The Golden State.

ERICK: Hollywood. Sunset Boulevard.

COCHOCHO: Many Mexicans, no?

ERICK: Route 66. James Dean.

JAIME: I have a nephew in Las Vegas. Is that California?

COCHOCHO (after opening a bottle of beer with his teeth): Don’t answer him. He’s lying. He doesn’t even know where Las Vegas is. He doesn’t know where California is. Ignore him. Ignore the both of them. That’s what we do.

ERICK: Magic Johnson. The Olympics.

COCHOCHO (to Erick): Are you just saying words at random? Do you ever listen to yourself? (to Nelson) Forgive him. Forgive us. It’s Friday.

NELSON: I understand.

JAIME: Friday is an important day.

ERICK: The day before Saturday.

NELSON: Of course.

JAIME: And after Thursday.

COCHOCHO: As I said, forgive us.

As well as being the oldest of the group, Santos is also the most formal in speech and demeanor. Suit and tie. He’s been waiting for the right moment to speak. He imagines everyone else has been waiting for this too, for their opportunity to hear him.

SANTOS: I’m appalled by all this. This… What is the phrase? This lack of discipline. We must be kind to our guest. Make a good impression. Is it very loud in here? Perhaps you don’t notice it. I’m sure things are different where you live. Orderly. I was your father’s history teacher. That is a fact.

Nelson looks to his father for confirmation. A nod from Manuel.

MANUEL: He was. And I remember everything you taught me, Profe.

SANTOS: I doubt that. But it was my class, I believe, that inculcated in your father the desire to go north, to the capital. I take responsibility for this. Each year, my best students leave. I’m retired now and I don’t miss it, but I was sad watching them go. Of course they have their reasons. If these others had been paying any attention at all to history as I taught it, they might have understood the logic of migration. It’s woven into the story of this nation. I don’t consider this something to celebrate, but they might have understood it as a legacy they’d inherited. They might have been a bit more ambitious.

COCHOCHO: Profe, you’re being unfair.

SANTOS (to Nelson, ignoring Cochocho): Your father was the best student I ever had.

MANUEL (sheepishly): Not true, Profe, not true.

SANTOS: Of course it’s true. Are you calling me a liar? Not like these clowns. I taught them all. (nodding toward Erick, who is pouring himself a glass of beer) This one could barely read. Couldn’t sit still. Even now, look at him. Doesn’t even know who the president is. (Television: generic politician, his corruption self-evident, as clear as the red sash across his chest.) The only news he cares about is the exchange rate.

ERICK: The only news that matters. I have expenses. A son and two daughters.

COCHOCHO (to Nelson): And you can marry either of them. Take one of the girls off his hands, please.

SANTOS: Or the boy. That’s allowed over there, isn’t it?

NELSON: How old are the girls?

COCHOCHO: Old enough.

NELSON: Pretty?

ERICK: Very.

COCHOCHO (eyebrows raised, skeptical): A man doesn’t look for beauty in a wife. Rather, he doesn’t look only for beauty. We can discuss the details later. Right, Erick?

Erick nods absent-mindedly. It’s as if he’s already lost the thread of the conversation.

SANTOS: So, young man. What do you do there in California?

NELSON (glancing first at his father): I have my own business. I work with an Arab. Together we have a store. It’s a bit complicated, actually.

SANTOS: Complicated. How’s that? What could be simpler than buying and selling? What sort of merchandise is it? Weapons? Metals? Orphans?

Television: in quick succession, a handgun, a barrel with a biohazard symbol, a sad-looking child. The child remains on-screen, even after Nelson begins speaking.

NELSON: We began with baby supplies. Milk. Formula. Diapers. That sort of thing. It was a government program. For poor people.

JAIME: Poor Americans?

NELSON: That’s right.

COCHOCHO: Don’t be so ignorant. There are poor people there too. You think your idiot cousin in Las Vegas is rich?

JAIME: He’s my nephew. He wants to be a boxer.

COCHOCHO (to Nelson): Go on.

NELSON: This was good for a while, but there is—you may have heard. There have been some problems in California. Budgets, the like.

SANTOS (drily): I can assure you these gentlemen have not heard.

NELSON: So we branched out. We rented the space next door, and then the space next door to that. We sell clothes in both. We do well. They come every first and fifteenth and spend their money all at once.

JAIME: You said they were poor.

NELSON: American poor is… different.

SANTOS: Naturally.

COCHOCHO: Naturally.

NELSON: We drive down to Los Angeles every three weeks to buy the inventory. Garment district. Koreans. Jews. Filipinos. Businessmen.

SANTOS: Very well. An entrepreneur.

MANUEL: He didn’t learn this from me.

SANTOS: You speak Arabic now? Korean? Hebrew? Filipino?

NELSON: No. My partner speaks Spanish.

COCHOCHO: And your English?

MANUEL: My son’s English is perfect. Shakespearean.

COCHOCHO: Two stores. And they both sell clothes.

NELSON: We have Mexicans, and we have blacks. Unfortunately these groups don’t get along very well. The Mexicans ignore the blacks, who ignore the Mexicans. The white people ignore everyone, but they don’t shop with us and so we don’t worry about them. We have a store for each group.

SANTOS: But they—they all live in the same district?

Television: panning shot of an East Oakland street scene: International Boulevard. Mixed crowds in front of taco trucks, tricked-out cars rolling by very slowly, chrome rims spinning, glinting in the fierce sunlight. Latinas pushing strollers, black boys in long white T-shirts and baggy jeans, which they hold up with one hand gripping the crotch.

NELSON: They do. And we don’t choose sides.

COCHOCHO: Of course not. You’re there to make money. Why would you choose sides?

JAIME: But you live there too? With the blacks? With the Mexicans?

They look him over, a little disappointed. They’d thought he was more successful. Behind the scene, Elena prepares to bring more beer to the table, but her daughter stops her, takes the bottles, and goes herself.

NELSON: Yes. There are white people too.

CELIA: Excuse me, pardon me.

Celia has inky black eyes and wears a version of her mother’s outfit—an old T-shirt, sweatpants, sandals. On her mother, this clothing represents a renunciation of sexual possibility. On Celia, they represent quite the opposite.

NELSON (eagerly, wanting to prove himself—to the men? to Celia?): I’d like to buy a round. If I may.

COCHOCHO: I’m afraid that’s not possible. (slips Celia a few bills) Go on, dear.

Celia lingers for a moment, watching Nelson, until her mother shoos her away. She disappears offstage. Meanwhile the conversation continues.

ERICK: You’re the guest. Hospitality is important.

SANTOS: These things matter to us. You think it folkloric, or charming. We’re not offended by the way you look at us. We are accustomed to the anthropological gaze. (this last phrase accompanied by air quotes) We feel sorry for you because you don’t understand. We do things a certain way here. We have traditions. (to Manuel) How much does your boy know about us? About our town? Have you taught him our customs?

NELSON: I learned the songs when I was a boy.

MANUEL: But he was raised in the city, of course.

COCHOCHO: What a shame. Last time I went was six years ago, when I ran for Congress. A detestable place. I hope you don’t mind my saying that.

MANUEL: Certainly you aren’t the only one who holds that opinion.

SANTOS: He wanted very badly to win. He would’ve happily moved his family there.

JAIME: And your wife, she’s from the city?

MANUEL: She is.

COCHOCHO (to Nelson): You’re lucky to have left. How long have you been in California?

NELSON: Since I was eighteen.

JAIME: It’s a terrible place, but still, you must miss home quite a bit.

NELSON (laughing): No, I wouldn’t say that, exactly.

ERICK: The food?

NELSON: Sure.

JAIME: The family?

NELSON: Yes, of course.

MANUEL: I’m flattered.

JAIME: Your friends?

NELSON (pausing to think): Some of them.

ERICK: Times have changed.

SANTOS: No, Erick, times have not changed. The youth are not all that different than before. Take Manuel. Let’s ask him. Dear Manuel, pride of this poor, miserable village, tell us: how often do you wake up missing this place where you were born? How often do you think back, and wish you could do it over again, never have left, and stayed here to raise a family?

Manuel is caught off guard, not understanding if the question is serious or not. On the television: a shot of the plaza by night. Quickly recovering, he decides to take the question as a joke.

MANUEL: Every day, Profe.

Everyone but Santos laughs.

SANTOS: I thought as much. Some people like change, they like movement, transition. A man’s life is very short and of no consequence. We have a different view of time here. A different way of placing value on things. We find everything you Americans—

NELSON: We Americans? But I lived in this country until I was eighteen!

SANTOS (talking over him): Everything you Americans say is very funny. Nothing impresses us unless it lasts five hundred years. We can’t even begin to discuss the greatness of a thing until it has survived that long. (It’s not clear whom Santos is addressing. Still, there’s a murmur of approval. His eyes close. He’s a teacher again, in the classroom.) This town is great. The ocean is great. The desert and the mountains beyond. There are some ruins in the foothills, which you surely know nothing about. They are undoubtedly, indisputably great; as are the men who built them, and their culture. Their blood, which is our blood, and even yours, though unfortunately… how shall I put it? Diluted. Not great: the highway, the border. The United States. Where do you live? What’s that place called?

NELSON: Oakland, California.

SANTOS: How old?

NELSON: A hundred years?

SANTOS: Not great. Do you understand?

NELSON: I’m sure I don’t. If I may: those five-hundred-year-old ruins, for example. You’ll notice I’m using your word, Profe. Ruins. Am I wrong to question whether they’ve lasted?

Television: the ruins.

SANTOS (taking his seat again): You would have failed my class.

NELSON: What a shame. Like these gentlemen?

SANTOS: Nothing to be proud of. Nothing at all.

NELSON (transparently trying to win them over): I’d be in good company.

ERICK: Cheers.

JAIME: Cheers.

MANUEL (reluctantly): Cheers.

COCHOCHO (stern, clearing his throat): I did not fail that class or any class. It’s important you know this. I didn’t want to mention it, but I am deputy mayor of this town. I once ran for Congress. I could have this bar shut down tomorrow.

ERICK/JAIME (together, alarmed): You wouldn’t!

COCHOCHO: Of course not! Don’t be absurd! (pause) But I could. I am a prominent member of this community.

ERICK: Don’t be fooled by his name.

COCHOCHO: It’s a nickname! A term of endearment! These two? Their nicknames are vulgar. Unrepeatable. And your father? What was your nickname, Manuel?

MANUEL: I didn’t have one.

COCHOCHO: Because no one bothered to give him a name. He was cold. Distant. Arrogant. He looked down on us even then. We knew he’d leave and never come back.

Manuel shrugs. Cochocho, victorious, smiles arrogantly.

NELSON: Here he is! He’s returned!

SANTOS: How lucky we are. Blessed.

COCHOCHO: Your great-uncle’s old filling station? It’s mine now. Almost. I have a minority stake in it. My boy works there. It’ll be his someday.

As if reminded of his relative wealth, Cochocho orders another round. No words, only gestures. Again Celia arrives at the table, bottles in hand, as Elena looks on, resigned. This time all the men, including Nelson’s father, ogle the girl. She might be pretty after all. She hovers over the table, leaning in so that Nelson can admire her. He does, without shame. Television: a wood-paneled motel room, a naked couple on the bed. The window is open. They’re fucking.

SANTOS (to Manuel): Don’t take this the wrong way. The primary issue… What Cochocho is trying to say, I think, is that some of us… We feel abandoned. Disrespected. You left us. Now your son is talking down to us.

NELSON (amused): Am I?

MANUEL: Is he?

SANTOS: We don’t deserve this, Manuel. You don’t remember! (to the group) He doesn’t remember! (to Nelson) Your father was our best student in a generation. The brightest, the most promising. His father—your grandfather, God rest his soul—had very little money, but he was well liked, whereas your great-uncle… We tolerated Raúl. For a while he was rich and powerful, but he never gave away a cent. He saw your father had potential, but he wanted him to help run the filling station, to organize his properties, to invest. These were his ambitions. Meanwhile, your father, I believe, wanted to be—

NELSON: A professor of literature. At an American university. We’ve discussed this.

COCHOCHO: Why not a local one?

Manuel has no response, is slightly ashamed.

SANTOS: Pardon me. It’s a very conventional ambition for a bookish young man. Decent. Middle of the road. You had politics?

MANUEL: I did. (pause) I still do.

SANTOS: A rabble-rouser. An agitator. He made some people here very angry, and the teachers—and I was leader of this concerned group, if I remember correctly—we collected money among us, to send him away. We didn’t want to see his talent wasted. Nothing destroys our promising youth more than politics. Did he tell you he won a scholarship? Of course. That’s a simpler story. He made his powerful uncle angry, and Raúl refused to pay for his studies. Your grandfather didn’t have the money either. We sent him away for his own good. We thought he’d come back and govern us well. We hoped he might learn something useful. Become an engineer. An architect. A captain of industry. (sadly) We expected more. We needed more. There’s no work here. Jaime, for example. What do you do?

JAIME: Sir?

SANTOS (impatiently): I said, what do you do?

JAIME: I’m unemployed. I was a bricklayer.

SANTOS: Erick?

ERICK: I’m a tailor. (to Nelson, brightly, with an optimism that does not match the mood of the table) At your service, young man!

SANTOS: See? He made me this suit. Local cotton. Adequate work. I’m on a fixed income. Cochocho. He is deputy mayor. You know that now. But did you know this? The money he just spent on our drinks? That is our money. He stole it like he stole the election. He brings his suits from the capital. We don’t say anything about it because that would be rude. And he is, in spite of his questionable ethics, our friend.

COCHOCHO (appalled): Profe!

SANTOS: What? What did I say? You’re not our friend? Is that what you’re alleging?

Cochocho, dejected, unable or unwilling to defend himself. Erick and Jaime comfort him. Just then, Elena’s daughter reappears, eyes on Nelson. Television: motel room, naked couple in an acrobatic sexual position, a yogic balancing act for two, a scramble of flesh, such that one can’t discern whose legs belong to whom, whose arms, how his and her sexual organs are connecting or even if they are.

CELIA: Another round, gentlemen?

MANUEL: I insist—

NELSON: If you’ll allow me—

SANTOS (stopping them both with a wave, glaring at Cochocho): So, are you our friend or not? Will you spend our money or keep it for yourself? (to Nelson) Unfortunately, this too is tradition.

NELSON: Five hundred years?

SANTOS: Much longer than that, boy.

NELSON: Please. I’d consider it an honor to buy a round.

COCHOCHO (still angry): Great idea! Let the foreigner spend his dollars!

At this, Nelson stands and steps toward the startled Celia. He kisses her on the mouth, brazenly, and as they kiss, he takes money from his own pocket, counts it without looking, and places it in her hand. She closes her fist around the money, and it vanishes. It’s unclear whether he’s paying for the drinks or for the kiss itself, but in either case, Celia doesn’t question it. The four local men look on, astounded.

SANTOS: Imperialism!

COCHOCHO: Opportunism!

JAIME: Money!

ERICK: Sex!

Manuel stares at his son, but says nothing. Takes a drink. Curtain.

I should be clear about something: it is never the words, but how they are spoken that matters. The intent, the tone. The farcical script quoted above is only an approximation of what actually occurred that evening, after my father challenged me to play Francisco, or a version of him, for this unsuspecting audience. Many other things were said, which I’ve omitted: oblique insults; charmingly ignorant questions; the occasional reference to one or another invented episode of American history. I improvised, using my brother’s letters as a guide, even quoting from them when the situation allowed—the line, for example, about Mexicans ignoring blacks and vice versa. That statement was contained within one of Francisco’s early dispatches from Oakland, when he was still eagerly trying to understand the place for himself and not quite able to decipher the many things he saw.

My most significant dramatic choice was not to defend myself all too vigorously. Not to defend Oakland, or the United States. That would have been a violation of character, whereas this role was defined by a basic indifference to what was taking place. They could criticize, impugn, belittle—it was all the same to me, I thought (my character thought). They could say what they wanted to say, and I would applaud them for it; after all, at the end of the day, I (my character) would be heading back to the U.S., and they’d be staying here. I needed to let them know this, without saying it explicitly. That’s how Francisco would have done it—never entirely sinking into the moment, always hovering above it. Distant. Untouchable.

Through it all, my old man sat very quietly, deflecting attention even when they began discussing him directly, his choices, the meaning and impact of his long exile. I’ve hurried through the part where my father’s friends expressed, with varying levels of obsequiousness, their admiration, their wonder, their jealousy. I’ve left it out because it wasn’t the truth; it was habit—how you treat the prodigal son when he returns, how you flatter him in order to claim some of his success as your own. But this fades. It is less honest and less interesting than the rest of what took place that night. The surface: Jaime and Erick drank heavily, oblivious and imperturbable to the end, and were for that very reason the most powerful men in the room. I could not say they were any drunker when we left than they were when we arrived. Cochocho, on the other hand, drank and changed dramatically: he became more desperate, less self-possessed, revealing in spite of himself the essential joylessness at the core of his being. His neatly combed hair somehow became wildly messy, his face swollen and adolescent, so that you could intuit, but not see, a grown man’s features hidden beneath. No one liked him; more to the point, he did not like himself. And then there was Santos, who was of that generation that catches cold if they leave the house without a well-knotted necktie; who, like all retired small-town teachers, had the gloomy nostalgia of a deposed tyrant. I caught him looking at Celia a few times with hunger—the hunger of an old man remembering better days—and it moved me. We locked eyes, Santos and I, just after one of these glances; he bowed his head, embarrassed, and looked down at his shoes. He began to hate me, I could feel it. He expressed most clearly what the others were unwilling to acknowledge: that the visitors had upset their pride.

We’d reminded them of their provincialism.

Which is why I liked Santos the best. Even though the role I was inhabiting placed us at opposite ends of this divide; in truth, I identified very closely with this wounded vanity. I felt it, would feel it, would come to own this troubling sense of dislocation myself. I knew it intimately: it was how the real Nelson felt in the presence of the real Francisco.

Hurt. Small.

Now the lights in the bar hummed, and the empty beer bottles were magically replaced with new ones, and my father’s old history teacher aged before my eyes, the color draining from him until he looked like the people in Raúl’s old photographs. Jaime and Erick maintained the equanimity of statues. Cochocho, with his ill humor and red, distended skin, looked like the mold spreading on Raúl’s kitchen wall. He’d removed his suit jacket, revealing dark rings of sweat at the armpits of his dress shirt. He asked about my great-uncle’s house, and when my father said he’d transferred the property to a cousin of ours, the deputy mayor responded with a look of genuine disappointment.

“You could have left it to your son,” he said.

It wasn’t what he really meant, of course: Cochocho probably had designs on it himself, some unscrupulous plan that would net him a tidy profit. But I played along, as if this possibility had just occurred to me.

“That’s true,” I said, facing my old man. “Why didn’t you?”

My father chose this moment to be honest. “I didn’t want to burden you with it.”

And then the night began to turn: my old man frowned as soon as the words had escaped. It was more of a grimace, really, as if he were in pain; and I thought of those faces professional athletes make after an error, when they know the cameras are on them: they mime some injury, some phantom hurt to explain their mistake. It’s a shorthand way of acknowledging, and simultaneously deflecting, responsibility. We sat through a few unpleasant moments of this, until my father forced a laugh, which sounded very lonely because no one joined him in it.

“A burden, you say?”

This was Santos, who, excluding a year and a half studying in France, had lived in the town for all of his seventy-seven years.

Just then Celia came to the table with two fresh bottles. “Sit with us,” I said. I blurted this out on impulse, for my sake and my father’s, just to change the subject. She smiled coquettishly, tilting her head to one side, as if she hadn’t heard correctly. Her old T-shirt was stretched and loose, offering the simple line of her thin neck, and the delicate ridge of her collarbone, for our consideration.

“I would love to,” Celia said, “but it appears there is no room here for a lady.”

She was right: we were six drunken men pressed together in a crowded, unpleasant rectangle. If more than two of us leaned forward, our elbows touched. It was a perfect answer, filling us all with longing, and though we hurried to make room, Celia had already turned on her heel and was headed back to the bar. She expected us to stay for many hours longer, was confident she’d have other opportunities to tease us. Her mother glared at her.

But the men hadn’t forgotten my father’s insult.

“Explain,” said Santos.

My old man shook his head. He wore an expression I recognized: the same distant gaze I’d seen that first night, when we’d sat up, drinking tea and looking through Raúl’s old photographs. Who are these people? What do they have to do with me? He wasn’t refusing; he simply found the task impossible.

I decided to step in, playing the one card my father and I both had.

“I think I know what my old man is trying to get at,” I said. “I believe I do. And I understand it because I feel the same way toward the capital. He meant no offense, but you have to understand what happens, over time, when one leaves.”

Santos, Cochocho, and the others gave me skeptical looks. Nor, it should be said, did my father seem all that convinced. I went on anyway.

“Let’s take the city, for example. I love that place—I realize that’s a controversial statement in this crowd, but I do. Listen. I love its gray skies, its rude people, its disorder, its noise. I love the stories I’ve lived there, the landmarks, the ocean, which is the same as the ocean here, by the way. But now, in spite of that love, when I have a son, I would not leave it to him. I would not say: here, boy, take this. It’s your inheritance. It’s yours. I would not want him to feel obligated to love it the way I do. Nor would that be possible. Do you understand? Does that make sense? He’ll be an American. I have no choice in the matter. That’s a question of geography. And like Americans, he should wake into adulthood and feel free.”

I sat back, proud of my little speech.

“Ah!” Santos said. It was a guttural sound, a physical complaint, as if I’d injured him. He scowled. “Rank nationalism,” he said. “Coarse jingoism of the lowest order. Are you saying we’re not free?”

We fell silent.

For a while longer the bottles continued to empty, almost of their own accord, and I felt I was perceiving everything through watery, unfocused eyes. The television had been trying to tell me something all night, but its message was indecipherable. I was fully Francisco now. That’s not true—I was an amalgam of the two of us, but I felt as close to my brother then as I had in many years. Most of it was internal and could not have been expressed with any script, with any set of lines. But this audience—I thought back to the two antagonists and Joselito’s moto-taxi, the way they became fully invested in the scene the moment they realized they were being watched. I’d taken my brother’s story and amplified it. Made it mine, and now theirs, for better or for worse. It was no longer a private argument, but a drama everyone had a stake in. I felt good. Content. Seized by that powerful sense of calm you have when you have understood a character, or rather, when you feel that a character has understood you. I felt very confident, very brash, as I’d imagined my brother had felt all these many years on his journey across North America.

I stood then and confirmed what I’d begun to sense while seated: I was very drunk. It was comforting in a way, to discover that all that drinking had not been done in vain. It was time to go. Celia and her mother came out from behind the bar to clear off the table, and the other men stood as well. And this was the moment I as Francisco, or perhaps Francisco as me, pulled Celia close and kissed her on the mouth. Perhaps this was what the television had been trying to tell me. She kissed me back. I heard the men call out in surprise, heard Celia’s mother as well, shrill and protective, but entirely reasonable. After all, who was this young man? And just what did he think he was doing?

I placed one hand at the small of Celia’s back, pulling her to me. The crowd continued to voice its disapproval, scandalized, but also—I felt certain—glad for us. The dance is complete. The virile foreigner has made his mark. The pretty girl has claimed her property. And it was the role of the gathered men to be appalled, or to pretend to be; the role of the mother to wail about her daughter’s chastity when she herself had never been chaste. But when it was over, when Celia and I separated, everyone was grinning. The old men, my father, even Elena.

Very late that night I called Rocío. I did not feel any guilt. I just wanted to talk to her, perhaps have her read me the letter I’d already imagined. Be amused by her. Perhaps laugh and discuss her lover’s murder. It must have been three or four in the morning, and I could not sleep. I’d begun to have doubts about what had happened, what it meant. A few hours before, it had all seemed triumphant; now it felt abusive. The plaza was empty, of course, just like the previous night; only more so—a kind of emptiness that feels eternal, permanent. I knew I would never come back to this place, and that realization made me a little sad. From where I stood, I could see the sloping streets, the ocean, the unblinking night; and nearer, the listing palm tree scarred with names. I would have written Celia’s name on it—a useless, purely romantic gesture, to be sure—but the truth is I never knew her name. I’ve chosen to call her Celia because it feels disrespectful to address her as the barwoman’s daughter. So impersonal, so anonymous. A barwoman’s daughter tastes of bubblegum and cigarettes, whereas Celia’s warm tongue had the flavor of roses.

Santos and Cochocho and Jaime and Erick left us soon after the kiss, and it was just me and my father, still feeling amused by what had happened, what we’d been a part of. We maybe felt a little shame too, but we didn’t talk about it because we didn’t know how. Grown men with hurt feelings are transparent creatures; grown men who feel dimly they have done something wrong are positively opaque. It would’ve been much simpler if we’d all just come to blows. Santos and Cochocho wandered off, a bit dazed, as if they’d been swindled. My father and I did a quick circle around the plaza and begged off for the evening. We never ate. Our hunger had vanished. I tried and failed to sleep, spent hours listening to my father’s snores echoing through the house. Now I punched in the numbers from the phone card, and let the phone ring for a very long time. I wasn’t drunk anymore. I liked the sound because it had no point of origin; I could imagine it ringing in the city, in that apartment I shared with Rocío (where she was asleep and could not hear, or was perhaps out with friends on this weekend night), but this was pure fantasy. I was not hearing that ring at all, of course. The ringing I heard came from inside the line, from somewhere within the wires, within the phone, an echo of something mysterious emerging from an unfixed and floating territory.

I waited for a while, listening, comforted; but in the end, there was no answer.

We left the next morning; locked the house, dropped the key in the neighbor’s mail slot, and fled quickly, almost furtively, hoping to escape without having to say goodbye to anyone. I had a pounding headache, and I’d barely slept at all. We made it to the filling station at the top of the hill without attracting notice, and then paused. My father was at the wheel, and I could see this debate flaring up within him—whether to stop and fill the tank or head north, away from this place and what it represented. Even the engine had doubt; it would not settle on an idling speed. We stopped. We had to. There might not be another station for many hours.

It was Cochocho’s son tending the pumps. He was a miniature version of his father: the same frown, the same fussy irritation with the world. Everyone believes they deserve better, I suppose, and in this respect, he was no different from me. Still, I disliked him intensely. He had fat adolescent hands and wore clothes that could have been handed down from Celia’s mother.

“So you’re off, then?” the boy said to my father through the open window.

The words were spoken without a hint of friendliness. His shoulders tensed, his jaw set in an expression of cold distrust. There was so much disdain seeping toward us, so determined and intentional, I almost found it funny. I felt like laughing, though I knew this would only make matters worse. Part of me—a large part—didn’t care: my chest was full of that big-city arrogance, false, pretentious, and utterly satisfying. The boy narrowed his eyes at us, but I was thinking to myself:

Goodbye, sucker!

“Long drive,” said Cochocho’s son.

And I heard my father say, “A full day, more or less.”

Then Cochocho’s son, to me: “Back to California?”

I paused. Remembered. Felt annoyed. Nodded. A moment prior I’d decided to forget the boy, had dismissed him, disappeared him. I’d cast my eyes instead down the hill, at the town and its homes obscured by a layer of fog.

“That’s right,” I said, though California felt quite far away—as a theory, as a concept, to say nothing of an actual place where real human beings might live.

“I used to work here, you know,” my old man offered.

The boy nodded with sublime disinterest. “I’ve heard that,” he said.

The tank was filled, and an hour later we were emptying our pockets for the bored, greedy soldiers. They were the age of Cochocho’s son, and just as friendly. Three hours after that, we were passing through Joselito’s hometown, in time to see a funeral procession; his, we supposed. It moved slowly alongside the highway, a somber cloud of gray and black, anchored by the doleful sounds of an out-of-tune brass band. The two men who’d fought over the moto-taxi now stood side by side, holding one end of the casket and quite obviously heartbroken. Whether or not they were acting now, I wouldn’t dare to speculate. But I did ease the car almost to a stop; and I did roll my window down and ask my old man to roll down his. And we listened to the band’s song, with its impossibly slow melody, like time stretched thin. We stayed there a minute, as they marched away from us, toward the cemetery. It felt like a day. Then we were at the edge of the city; and then we were home, as if nothing had happened at all.