At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  “Are you still acting,” Tania asked when she got to Nelson, “or are you actually that sick?”

  He didn’t know how to respond, so when someone shouted, “He’s drunk!” Nelson felt relieved. The room roared with laughter, and then everyone sat.

  The drinking began in earnest now, and a guitar soon appeared from a hidden corner of the room. It was passed from person to person, making a few laps around the circle before Tania finally kept it. Everyone cheered. She strummed a few chords, then cleared her throat, welcoming the visitors, thanking them all for listening. She sang in Quechua, picking a complex accompaniment, her agile fingers unrestrained by the cold. Nelson turned to Henry and asked him in a low voice what the song was about.

  “About love,” he whispered, without taking his eyes off her. It seems they had briefly been involved two decades before. Seeing her, he told me later, unnerved him, filling him at once with regret and optimism. He felt then that he’d entered a gray period of his life, from which there was no easy escape. One could not enter the world of a play. One could not escape one’s life. Your bad choices clung to you. And even if such a thing were possible, it would require a strength of will he lacked, or a stroke of good fortune he didn’t deserve.

  As for Nelson, the night wore on and he found himself appreciating Tania’s beauty with greater and greater clarity. Hours passed, and when he was finally succumbing to the cold and the liquor, Tania offered to lead him back to the hostel where they were staying. This was noted by the attendees with feigned alarm, but she ignored them. Outside in the frigid night, her eyes glowed like black stars. The town was small, and there was no possibility of getting lost. They trudged drunkenly through its streets, both wrapped in a blanket Aparicio had lent them.

  “You sing beautifully,” Nelson said. “What was it about?”

  “Just old songs.”

  “Henry told me you were singing about love.”

  She had a beautiful laugh: clear and unpretentious, like moonlight. “He doesn’t speak Quechua. Must have been a lucky guess.”

  When they got to the door of the hostel, she asked Nelson if he was happy. She was curious, she said, because his face was so hard to read.

  “Hard to read—is that a compliment?” Nelson asked.

  “If you want.”

  “Did you see the play?”

  Tania nodded.

  “And did you like it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Very much.”

  “Then I’m happy.”

  He moved to kiss her, but she dodged him, surprisingly alert, as if she were an athlete specially trained in dodging kisses. She patted him on the head, and they stood there awkwardly for a moment, until she smiled.

  “It’s fine,” Tania said. “You’re sweet. You remind me of my son. Now, drink lots of water, and get as much rest as you can.”

  Then she walked back to the party. Nelson watched her go; and though he was hundreds of kilometers away from home—in a place as different from the boardwalk of La Julieta as it might be from the surface of a distant planet—he recalled Ixta, who had stopped believing in his love, and had walked away from him. Every day Nelson waged a pitched battle against the memory of their conversation at the lighthouse, a brutal war, in which he was both victor and vanquished. In his mind he tried to change the outcome of this moment, like a magician attempting to bend a spoon through sheer concentration. No matter what he tried, it never worked. He recalled his silence now, that he’d let her go, and felt ashamed.

  “Tania!” he shouted.

  She turned, but said nothing. She was waiting.

  “I love you!”

  She laughed elatedly, as if it was the most wonderful joke she’d ever heard.

  “He was a handsome boy,” Tania told me later. “If he were just a bit older, I would have taken him home with me.”

  It was more than a month and a half into the tour by then; six weeks separated from his life, from his friends, from his dreams. Nelson had turned twenty-three the first week of May, without sharing the news with anyone. He was on his own. Henry had asked them all not to call home, not to write letters, but to immerse themselves in the moment. Now it was worth asking: What good was that advice, really? What did it achieve if the present was not new or different at all, but fundamentally the same: the usual traumas, only now set on a cold mountaintop, on a pitch-black night? Inside the hostel, the owner gave Nelson a large rubber bladder, swollen with boiling water, and as he prepared for bed, alone now, he held it in his hands. It was like holding a human heart, his own perhaps. He felt what remained of his contentment evaporating. He tried to go over his day: what had happened, or what, to his chagrin, had not. The cold made coherent thought nearly impossible, so Nelson lay down with the bladder pressed against his belly, curling himself around it like a snail. His eyes began to close. Was it worth it, he wondered: the travel, and the cold, and the distance, which felt, at times, like that exile Henry had clamored for that first day in the cab? What did it all amount to if he’d already ruined his life by letting Ixta walk away? Was he ruining his life even now?

  He willed himself to rise, went down once more, where he woke the owner of the hostel, apologizing. Would it be possible to make a phone call, he asked her, to the capital?

  The woman stood in her nightgown, observing the young actor through narrow, half-closed eyes. “There’s no telephone,” she said, suddenly upset. “You and your people always want a telephone, but I keep telling you!”

  ONE AFTERNOON, Henry brought up the story of his imprisonment. He was talking to Nelson ostensibly, but naturally he was also talking to himself. In 1986, he was thirty-one years old, and the night of his arrest, his first concern had been for the play itself. His work was all that mattered. He didn’t notice the two men in dark suits hanging around after the show. They stood apart, talking to no one, leaning against the mildewed walls of the Olympic which, by hosting an experimental theater company like Diciembre, had officially entered a new, nearly terminal, stage in its long decline. (“We were there just before it went porno,” Patalarga told me.) The theater had emptied, the audience dispersed, and the actors were alone. One of the two men in dark suits approached. “You’re Henry Nuñez,” he said, as Henry made his way from behind the stage. It wasn’t a question. Henry wore a leather bag thrown over his shoulder, nothing inside but some smelly clothes and a few annotated scripts. He’d splashed water in his face, and argued with his cast of two, Patalarga and Diana, who weren’t even dating then. (“You must understand, my dear Alejito, this was back when Patalarga was still a virgin. Don’t laugh, he was barely twenty-five years old.”) The performance had been disappointing, and he’d told them so, in an angry tirade adorned with profanities. The small crew had gone. Diana had cursed him, called him “insensitive and tyrannical” before she fled as well. The theater was empty by then, just Henry and Patalarga, who was, at that moment, still backstage.

  “Do you remember?” Henry said to his old friend, and Patalarga nodded.

  Henry’s dissatisfaction turned to annoyance at the presence of these two strangers, who asked inane questions, when the entire theater universe of the capital knew he was Henry Nuñez. Who else, exactly, would he be?

  When it became clear Henry wasn’t going to respond, one of the men said, “You’ll have to come with us.” He spoke formally, very deliberately; Henry frowned, and the other man repeated the drab, rather passionless command, this time emphasizing the words “have to.”

  Patalarga emerged from behind the stage just then, quickly understood the situation (according to him), and tried to intercede; but by then a couple other men had materialized from the shadows of the Olympic; tough, unsmiling men, the sort who love settling arguments. They placed their giant hands on Henry. A few more words were spoken, some shouted, but in the end, this wasn’t a negotiation. They were taking the playwright, and that was that. When Patalarga wouldn’t shut up, they knocked him out and locked him in the ticket booth, where he would be fou
nd the following day by the custodian.

  Henry was held without human contact in a mercifully clean, though still unpleasant, cell. It took him a few days to understand the severity of the situation. He was questioned about the people he knew, the plays he wrote, his travels around the country, and his motives; but it was all strangely lethargic, inefficient, as if the police were too bored by it all to decide his fate. He wasn’t beaten or tortured; he surely would’ve confessed to anything at the mere threat of such treatment. On the third day, still thinking, breathing, and living in the mode of a playwright, he asked for a pen and some paper in order to jot down notes about his tedious imprisonment, things to remember should he ever need to write about his experiences. He was denied, but even then, in his naiveté, he still wasn’t worried. Not truly concerned. Disappointed, yes, disturbed; but if he’d been asked, Henry would’ve said he expected to be released any day, at any moment. His captivity was so ridiculous to him, he could hardly conceive of it. He just couldn’t understand why they were so upset—had they seen The Idiot President? It wasn’t even any good!

  Just when he was beginning to despair, he was allowed to receive a visitor. This must have been the fifth or sixth day. By then a story had been concocted: the authorities categorically denied Patalarga’s version of the arrest, saying they found Henry hours later, drunk, wandering the streets of the Old City. They claimed to have held him for his own safety.

  And why had they denied that Henry was in their custody for five days?

  A bureaucratic mix-up. A record-keeping error.

  And why were they still holding him?

  It was under investigation. Henry was the prime suspect in the beating and false imprisonment of Patalarga. “Most likely a lover’s quarrel,” the police spokesman said, with a slyly raised eyebrow, “though I would prefer not to speculate.”

  The docile press, however, speculated.

  Henry’s older sister, Marta, appeared that fifth or sixth afternoon, representing the entire living world outside the small cell which held him—his family, his friends, Diciembre and its supporters. Everyone. It was a burden that showed clearly on her face. Her eyes were ringed with dark bluish circles, and her skin was sallow. She hadn’t eaten, Marta reported; in fact, no one in the family had stopped to eat or rest for five days, and they were doing everything they could to get him out. He imagined them all—his large, bickering extended family—coming together to complete this task: it would be easier to put them on shifts and have them dig a tunnel beneath the jail. The image made him smile. Marta was happy to see Henry hadn’t been abused, and they passed much of the hour talking about plans for after his release. She had two children, a daughter and a son, ages six and four, who’d both drawn him get-well cards, because they’d been told their uncle was at the hospital. Henry found this amusing; the fact that the cards had been confiscated at the door of the jail, he found maddening. Everyone assured the family not to worry, that they’d remember this little anecdote later, and laugh.

  “Why wait?” Henry said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” his sister answered, but already she was suppressing a grin.

  He was referring to a game they’d developed as children: forced, spontaneous, and meaningless laughter. They’d used it to get out of chores, dismissed from church. With hard work and diligence, they’d developed and perfected this skill: rolling around, cackling, rubbing their bellies like lunatics, before doctor’s appointments, or family trips, or on the morning of a school exam for which they had not prepared. Neither recalled the game’s origins, but they’d been punished for it together on many occasions, always feigning innocence. We can’t help it, they’d both say, laughing still, tears pressing from the corners of their eyes, until their protests landed them in weekly brother-sister sessions with a child psychologist. Even these many years later, both were proud that they’d never betrayed the other. In their prime, when they were as close as two human beings can be (Henry, age ten, Marta a couple of years older), the two of them could manufacture laughter instantly, hysterical fits that lasted for a quarter of an hour, or longer. Henry considered it his first accomplished dramatic work.

  He insisted. “Why not?”

  They’d been whispering until then, but now they took deep breaths, like divers preparing for a descent. The cell, it turned out, had good acoustics. The laughter was tentative at first, building slowly, but soon it was ringing through the jail. Unstoppable, joyful, cathartic. At the end of the block, the guards who heard it had quite a different interpretation: it was demonic, even frightening. No one had ever laughed in this jail, not like this. They felt panic. One of them rushed to see what was happening, and was surprised to find brother and sister laughing heartily, holding hands, their cheeks glistening.

  The hour had passed.

  Leaving the jail that afternoon, Marta gave a brief statement to the press, which was shown on the television news that evening. Her brother was completely innocent, she said; he was an artist, the finest playwright of his generation, and the authorities had interrupted him and his actors in the legitimate pursuit of their art. Those responsible should be ashamed of what they’d done.

  The following day the charges of assault and false imprisonment were dropped, and replaced by other, more serious accusations. Henry was now being held for incitement and apology for terrorism. A new investigation was under way. He was given the news that morning by the same guard who’d come upon him and Marta laughing, who thankfully refrained from making the obvious statement about who might be laughing now, a small mercy which Henry nonetheless appreciated.

  He was driven from the jail in the back of a windowless military van, with nothing to look at but the unsmiling face of a soldier, a stern man of about forty, who did not speak. Henry closed his eyes, and tried to follow the van’s twisting path through the city he’d called home since age fourteen. “We’re going to Collectors, aren’t we?” he asked the soldier, who answered with a nod.

  On the morning of April 8, 1986, Henry entered the country’s most infamous prison. He wouldn’t leave until mid-November.

  9

  NELSON LIKED HEARING these stories; it was as if they filled in gaps in his knowledge he hadn’t known were there. He asked again and again: why haven’t you written about this?—but it was a question Henry never really answered convincingly. Every night in Collectors, friends paired off and walked circles around the prison yard, commiserating, confessing, doing all they could to imagine they were somewhere else. How do you set a play in a world that denies your characters any agency? Where do you begin? “Begin there!” Nelson would respond. “Or there! Or there!” (“Young writers believe everything constitutes a beginning,” Henry told me later, in a stern, professorial voice.) Undeterred, Nelson even offered to help: he would transcribe the scenes, or they could talk them out together. He could sketch the arc of each moment, write character treatments—they could collaborate. (“I never liked that word, to be quite honest,” Henry told me, noting its unfortunate political connotations.) Still, he pretended to be intrigued by the idea, that it was something worth considering, though he never committed to it. Perhaps, he told the eager young actor, when they returned.

  Patalarga, who has the clearest memories of those days of the tour, says he sensed Nelson’s admiration for Henry becoming more nuanced: no longer the blind respect of a young artist, or the ambitious striving of a protégé who wants recognition, it had become something more like the appreciation of a son who’s come to understand his father as a man, with all the complexity that implies.

  In other words: they were becoming friends.

  Meanwhile, the rainy season was ending. By that point, they’d spent some eight weeks on the road; had gone from the coast to the highlands to the lowlands and back up again; passing through a succession of villages that seemed from a distance to bleed together in kaleidoscopic intensity. The country, which for Nelson had always been a mystery, was real to him now, a series of stark tableaux come to l
ife: from mining settlements like Sihuas to lazy riverside towns in the lowlands to clusters of tiny houses spread atop a high mesa, homes to modest families of cattle grazers. This area fascinated Nelson most of all, these people who’d settled in ever-widening concentric circles around a massive slaughterhouse, smelling of offal and rot, a mean, dark place which was nonetheless the center of the region’s economic, social, and cultural life, and which had even become, for one brief but magical evening, a theater.

  They were mostly inured to the austere beauty of the landscape by then; it was right in front of them, so commonplace and overwhelming they could no longer see it. In Nelson’s journals his descriptions of the highland terrain are hampered by his own maddening ignorance, that of a lifelong city dweller who has no idea what he’s looking at: mountains are described with simplistic variations of “large,” “medium,” or “small,” as if he were ordering a soda from a fast-food restaurant. Trees and plants and birds, and even the color of the sky, are given much the same treatment. Greater attention is paid to the people: pages upon pages devoted to Cayetano, Tania, and others (descriptions which I’ve drawn from to prepare this manuscript), as well as a vast assortment of miners, laborers, farmers, money changers, and truck drivers whom they’d met along the way. They appear, unique and alive, often nameless, and then are gone.

  On the morning of June 11, 2001, Diciembre arrived in the small city of San Jacinto, which felt, relative to all the previous stops on the tour, like a version of Paris or New York or London. It was the largest town on their itinerary, and they were due to perform a couple nights at a local English language institute named after Franklin D. Roosevelt. How Patalarga had programmed this particular show, no one knew; but once in San Jacinto, Henry and Nelson thanked him for it. Suddenly dropped into the town’s delightful chaos, they became aware of the sensory deprivation they’d endured those long eight weeks. They walked casually through the city, taking in the movement with an appreciative mix of panic and wonder. San Jacinto’s sixty thousand or so residents lived atop a flat, dry plain, trading anything and everything according to rules only they understood. One noisy street was overrun with musicians for hire. “All the hits!” shouted a saleswoman with manic streaks of red in her hair. “Pay for eleven hours, and the twelfth hour is free!” Another was filled with the cheerful, drunken employees of a trucking company, christening six new vehicles in the middle of an intersection, blocking traffic in all directions. The trucks shone brightly with wax, as if smiling in the sun, and were decorated with bunting fastened to the tops of the cabs. Men dashed about, tossing confetti in the air, spraying the chassis with champagne. It was like a wedding, only it wasn’t clear who was marrying these giant, gleaming machines, or if they were marrying each other. Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson stayed to observe the confusing ceremony, and then, when the noise became too great, followed the railroad tracks away from the center, hoping for some quiet. For many blocks, they could hear the horn blasts, now fading, but still frantic and celebratory.