At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  The two men stood for a moment, something unspoken floating between them. The wood floor was dusty and cracked; the theater’s ticket booth, which had once represented so much possibility for Nelson and his father, was covered with a slab of pressboard. Nelson looked up at the ceiling of the ruined lobby: even the chandeliers seemed poised to fall at any moment.

  “We’ve never met before?” Patalarga asked.

  “At the audition.”

  “Besides that.”

  “No.”

  Patalarga stepped closer. He could sense the young man’s doubts. Nelson was half a head taller, but still Patalarga managed to throw an arm around the actor, and dropped his voice to a low rumble. “Have you been here before?”

  “No,” Nelson lied.

  “Do you know Diciembre? Do you know what we do?”

  Nelson said he did.

  Patalarga shook his head. “You think you do.”

  “I know this is where you put on The Idiot President. I’ve read Mr. Nuñez’s work.”

  Patalarga smiled. “Good. Make sure you tell him how much you like it. He’s not well these days.”

  Then he led Nelson into the theater, through the foyer (strong smell of bleach, threadbare carpet worn to a shine), and past the doors, to the orchestra. The brass-plated seat numbers had mostly been stolen, pried off, sold for scrap at some secondhand market on the outskirts of the capital. Some rows had seats gone as well, recalling for Nelson the proud, gap-toothed grin of a child. He searched involuntarily for the spot where he’d sat that second time—“my triumph over shame,” he’d written in his journal—as if one could remember that sort of thing. The carpet had been pulled up in certain places, and the cement floor below was adorned with overlapping oil stains, evidence of some carelessly attempted, and casually abandoned, repair.

  The playwright sat at the foot of the stage, a script in his lap, his legs dangling off the edge. He seemed rather small, even childlike, the domed roof of the theater rising high above him. He didn’t look up when Nelson appeared, but instead kept on reading inaudibly to himself. It was his own script, naturally; and as he read, he marveled, not at its quality (which in truth he found suspect) but at its mere survival. His own.

  Patalarga was right; Henry was not well. The playwright explained it to me this way: that week, and in all the weeks since that first rereading of his old script, even his daughter’s artwork had been unable to shake him from this melancholy. He’d begun to think very deeply and with some clarity about his time in prison. Who he was before, whom he’d become after, and how—or even if—those two men were related. There were many things he’d forgotten, others he’d attempted to forget; but the day he was sent to Collectors, Henry told me, was the loneliest of his life. He realized that day that nothing he’d ever learned previously had any relevance anymore, and each step he took away from the gate and toward his new home was like walking into a tunnel, away from the light. He was led through the prison complex, a vision of hell in those days, full of half-dead men baring the scarred chests to the world, impervious to the cold. He’d never been more scared in his life. One man promised to kill him at the first opportunity, that evening perhaps, if it could be arranged. Another, to fuck him. A third looked at him with the anxious eyes of a man hiding some terrible secret. Two guards led Henry through the complex, men whom he’d previously thought of as his tormentors, but who now felt like his protectors, all that stood between him and this anarchy. Halfway to the block, he realized they were as nervous as he was, that they, like him, were doing all they could to avoid eye contact with the inmates that surrounded them. At the door to the block, the guards unlocked Henry’s handcuffs, and turned to leave.

  The playwright looked at them helplessly. “Won’t you stay?” he asked, as if he were inviting them in for a drink.

  The two guards wore expressions of surprise.

  “We can’t,” one of them said in a low voice. He was embarrassed.

  Henry realized then that he was alone, that these two guards were the only men in uniform he’d seen since they’d left the gate. They turned and hurried back to the entrance.

  An inmate led Henry inside the block, where men milled about with no order or discipline. He remembers thinking, I’m going to die here, something all new inmates contemplated upon first entering the prison. Some of them, of course, were right. Henry was taken to his cell, and didn’t emerge for many days.

  He had mourned when the prison was razed, had even roused himself enough to participate in a few protests in front of the Ministry of Justice (though he’d declined to speak when someone handed him the bullhorn), but in truth, the tragedy had both broken him and simultaneously spared him the need to ever think about his incarceration again. No one who’d lived through it with him had survived. There was no one to visit, no one with whom to reminisce, no one to meet on the day of their release, and drive home, feigning optimism. In the many years since, there were times when he’d almost managed to forget about the prison completely. Whenever he felt guilty (which was not infrequently, all things considered), Henry told himself there was nothing wrong in forgetting; after all, he never really belonged there to begin with.

  Ana’s mother, now his ex-wife, had heard the stories (some of them), but that was years before, and she was no longer capable of feeling sympathy or solidarity toward the man who had betrayed her. Besides Patalarga, few people were, at least not by the time I became involved. Henry’s colleagues at the school where he taught were jealous because the director had granted him leave for the tour. If they’d known his controversial past, they likely would have used it as an excuse to be rid of him forever. His old friends from Diciembre were no better—their constant refrain after his release was that Henry should write a play about Collectors, something revolutionary, a denunciation, an homage to the dead, but he had no stomach for the project, had never been able to figure out how or where to begin.

  “It will be therapeutic,” these friends of his argued.

  To which Henry could only respond: “For whom?”

  Now that it was all coming back to him, he had no one to talk to. For years, he’d been losing friends and family at an alarming pace, in a process he felt helpless to reverse. He said offensive things at parties, he hit on his friend’s wives, he forgot to return phone calls. He stormed out of bad plays, scraping his chair loudly against the concrete floors so that all could turn and see the once famous playwright petulantly expressing his displeasure. (Later he felt guilty: “As if I never wrote a bad play!”) Sometime in the previous year he’d even offended his beloved sister, Marta, and now they weren’t talking. Worst of all, he couldn’t even remember what he’d done.

  Patalarga interrupted this reverie. “Henry,” he said. “This is Nelson.”

  The playwright set aside his old, imperfect script, and looked up, squinting at the actor: the young man’s features, his dumb grin, his unkempt hair, his pants in need of a hem. Of the audition Henry could recall very little. The handshake, yes. And that this boy had read the part of Alejo, the idiot president’s idiot son, with a preternatural ease.

  “You’re perfect,” Henry said now. “You’re, what? Eighteen, nineteen?”

  “Almost twenty-three,” said Nelson.

  Henry nodded. “Well, I’m the president.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The idiot president,” Patalarga added.

  THEY WENT TO A BAR to celebrate; it felt good to drink in the middle of an afternoon. They got a table in the back, far from the windows, where it was almost dark. The heat faded after the first pitcher. Someone sang a song; a couple quarreled—but what did it matter? “Soon we’ll be off, into the countryside!” Henry proclaimed, glass held high, his head light and his spirit charged. He felt better than he had in weeks. Optimistic. Patalarga seconded the notion, with similar enthusiasm; and the two old friends reminisced aloud for Nelson’s benefit: past tours, past shows, small Andean towns where they’d amazed audiences and romanced local
women. Epic, week-long drunks. Fights with police, escaping along mountain roads toward safety. Everything got stranger once you rose beyond an altitude of four thousand meters, that supernatural threshold after which all life becomes theater, and all theater Beckettian. The thin air is magical. Everything you do is a riddle.

  “I’ve never been off the coast,” Nelson admitted.

  They pressed him: “Never?”

  “Never,” Nelson repeated, his face reddening. It was shameful, in fact, now that he thought about it, though he’d never had occasion to feel ashamed of it before. His family’s few trips out of the city had always had the same unfortunate destination: Sebastián’s coastal hometown, a cheerless stop along the highway south of the capital. He felt something like anger now when he thought of it: He’d seen nothing of the world! Not even his own miserable country!

  Henry said, “Ah, life in the mountains! Patalarga can tell you all about it.”

  “Pack your oxygen tank,” warned Patalarga. “We’ll be going there in a few weeks.”

  Henry whistled. “Four thousand one hundred meters above sea level! Can you imagine the trauma? His brain has never recovered.”

  “What was it like?”

  Patalarga shrugged. “Bleak,” he said. “And beautiful.”

  They refilled their glasses from the pitcher, and called for another. Nelson wanted to know about the play. He still hadn’t seen a full script, had never found one in any anthology, though he’d checked them all, even the most obscure volumes his father had dug up in the National Library. Of course he remembered the controversy, he said, everyone did (a gross exaggeration), and Nelson even told them the improbable tale of how he’d heard Henry on the radio, interviewed from prison. “You sounded so strong,” Nelson said.

  Henry frowned. “I must have been acting.” He didn’t remember the interview. “In fact, if you want to know the truth, I don’t even remember writing the play.”

  Nelson did not believe him.

  The only solid proof of his authorship, Henry said, was that he’d been imprisoned for it. “The state made no mistakes during the war—surely you must have learned that in school.”

  Patalarga laughed.

  “I didn’t do well in school,” Nelson muttered, and dropped his chin. He’d drunk more than he realized. Suddenly his head was swimming.

  Patalarga allowed himself a moment of vanity: “I was assistant director,” he said, though it wasn’t clear to whom he was talking.

  Henry’s eyes were bright and enthusiastic now, but Nelson could see behind them a deep tiredness, a distance. Deep creases formed around his mouth when he smiled. When they’d met an hour ago, at the Olympic, he’d seemed about to cry. Henry continued: “Patalarga would have liked to have been arrested too. He’s always been a little jealous of my fame, you understand. Perhaps if he finishes that pitcher, he’ll be drunk enough to admit that what I’m saying is true.”

  Patalarga glared at Henry, then poured what remained of the pitcher into his glass. He drank it down greedily, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. “Henry hasn’t been the same since he left the prison. Still, he’s my friend. We tried to help, tried to get him out.”

  “They did help,” said Henry matter-of-factly. “They did get me out. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  He pinched himself, as if to further underline the point.

  “Yes,” Patalarga said, nodding. “That’s what I’ve been telling you for years.”

  They’d chosen a place well known to Nelson, a bar called the Wembley. At least once a week, after school, Nelson would meet his father at the National Library, and then they’d come to this bar together. It never changed. There were then and are now black-and-white photos of garlanded racehorses and women in wide, billowing dresses carrying parasols, men in dark suits and dark glasses who do not smile, and behind them, the barren hills that were once the frontiers of this city. The streets in the pictures are hardly recognizable, but if you look closely you can make out the vague outlines of the place the city has become. The people from the photos are rarely seen now, but every so often, they stroll into the Wembley as if they have just come from the racetrack, or stepped off a steamer ship, or attended a baptism at the cathedral around the corner. Sebastián might have been one of these men had he chosen something more lucrative to do, something besides library science, but even so, he would have joined them just as their power and relevance were waning. The wealthiest left during the war for reasons of security, the most daring thinkers faded into a protective invisibility, and the once large middle class is poor now: having once owned the city, indeed the country itself, all that remained of their vast holdings were bars like the Wembley, thick with the musty air of a rarely visited provincial museum. In the old days, if a gentleman happened to run out of cash, he could leave his jacket at the coat check, and receive credit based on the quality of the fabric, the workmanship of the tailor. It was simply assumed that a man wearing a suit had money to spare. Those times were long since extinguished, and still, Nelson’s father had loved the place. He’d eat a hard-boiled egg, drink one tall glass of beer, and quiz his son on what he’d learned in school that day. When he was finished, they’d catch the bus home.

  So when Henry ordered a hard-boiled egg to go along with his glass of beer, Nelson felt a shock, something within him shifting. He watched Henry eat, his smacking jaws and lively eyes, and compared this new face to the one he remembered as a boy: his father, who spent the war years smuggling dangerous books out of the library before the censors could destroy them. Here, at this very bar, Nelson’s old man had revealed his secret treasures: pulling from his briefcase Trotsky’s theories on armed insurrection, or a hand-printed booklet containing eulogies for Patrice Lumumba, or a chapbook of Gramsci’s outlandish poetry. And the years aged him: his gray hair thinning to a dramatic widow’s peak, a system of minute wrinkles adorning his face. The last time Nelson saw him, at the hospital, he’d looked like a fine pencil drawing of himself. Nelson wondered if he would look like that too, when he was old.

  “What?” Henry asked now, because the boy was staring. “Shall I order you an egg?”

  They spent the rest of the afternoon discussing the play itself: its rhythms, its meaning, its wordplay. Nelson jotted down notes as Henry and Patalarga spoke, considering the script’s inflection points, the breaks in the action, and the malaise that ran deep beneath the text, a gloom which Henry described as “indescribable.”

  Indescribable, wrote Nelson.

  “Why are you writing this down?” Patalarga asked. It wasn’t an antagonistic question; he was only curious.

  Nelson shrugged. “Is something the matter?”

  “We never wrote things down.”

  “Didn’t we?” Henry asked, because the truth was he didn’t remember.

  The plot of The Idiot President centered on an arrogant, self-absorbed head of state and his manservant. Each day, the president’s servant was replaced; the idea being that eventually every citizen of the country would have the honor of attending to the needs of the leader. These included helping him dress, combing his hair, reading his mail, etc. The president was fastidious and required everything follow a rather idiosyncratic protocol, so the better part of each day was spent teaching the new servant how things should be done. Hilarity ensued. Alejo, the president’s son, was a boastful lout and a petty thief, who remained a great source of pride for his father, in spite of his self-evident shortcomings. The climactic scene involved a heart-to-heart between the servant, played by Patalarga, and Nelson’s character, after the president has gone to sleep, wherein Alejo lets his guard down and admits that he has often thought of killing his father but is too frightened to go through with it. The servant is intrigued; after all, he lives in the ruined country, subject to the president’s disastrous whims, and furthermore has spent the entire day being humiliated by him. The president, whose power seems infinite from a distance, has been revealed to the servant as he really is, as the play’s
title suggests. The servant probes Alejo’s doubts, and he opens up, voicing concerns about freedom, about the rule of law, about the suffering of the people, until the servant finally allows that, yes, perhaps such a thing could be done. Though it would be daring, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea. For the sake of the country, you understand. Alejo pretends to mull it over, and then kills the startled manservant himself, as punishment for treason. He picks the corpse clean, pocketing the man’s wallet, his watch, his rings, and the play ends with him shouting toward the room where the president is sleeping.

  “Another one, Father! We’ll need another one for tomorrow!”

  If one recalls the times, it’s easy enough to understand why The Idiot President was so controversial during the war. The play debuted a few months after the inauguration of a new head of state, a young, charismatic but humorless man acutely lacking in confidence. Though Henry maintained during his interrogation that the piece was written with no specific president in mind, this new president was simply too self-involved to accept such a possibility. It’s as if he thought he was the only president in the world. Henry’s protests mattered not at all: he was sent to prison; his release seven months later was as arbitrary as his initial arrest. Meanwhile the country was speeding toward a precipice. The fall began in earnest soon after.

  Other topics covered that first evening at the Wembley: Henry’s daughter and her artistic gifts; Patalarga’s opinionated and talented wife, Diana, who’d played the role of Alejo in the first production of The Idiot President (“That’s how we met,” said Patalarga), but who’d wanted nothing to do with the revival, and had gladly made way for the new member of the troupe; Patalarga’s first cousin Cayetano, whom they’d meet on tour, and who’d spent many nights at the Wembley carving poetry into the scarred wooden tabletops with his penknife; and finally, the delicate negotiation a man makes with his ego in order to teach elementary school science when he is actually a playwright.

  On this last point, Nelson found he had a bit to say. Henry, according to Nelson, should not be working in an elementary school. Or driving a cab, even if he claimed to enjoy it. If Henry taught at all, it should be at the Conservatory. But in fact, if the world were fair, he would be abroad, in Paris or New York or Madrid, where his work could be appreciated. He should be overseeing the translations of his plays, winning awards, attending festivals, giving lectures, etc.