At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  They came to a small plaza where dozens of men stood among large chalkboards placed in rows that zigzagged from one end of the space to the other. It wasn’t at all clear what the men were after. A heavyset woman sat at one end of the chalkboards with a pen and clipboard in her lap; now and again, she would hand a piece of paper to an adolescent girl, who would then climb a small stepladder and begin copying the words out in colored chalk. The men would gather around, with severe expressions on their wind-bitten faces, scrutinizing her work. Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson watched from the edges of the crowd, waiting for the right moment to get a better look. For once Henry didn’t pretend he knew everything, but took in the scene with the same puzzlement as the rest. He sent Nelson, finally, to investigate.

  “You’re an actor,” Henry said, “you’ll blend.”

  Nelson returned moments later. He had not blended, but been met instead with dozens of distrustful eyes.

  They were job postings, he reported. Classified ads, performed live.

  Henry rejoiced. “Theater for the people!” he said, as if the idea had been his all along.

  That evening, they ate at a chicken restaurant near the center of town, its tables wrapped in thick plastic. They’d done well the previous night, recouping enough in donations to treat themselves to a real sit-down dinner. Lunch had passed without their even noticing it: confronted with the sights and sounds of San Jacinto, they’d simply forgotten to eat. Now a liter bottle of soda stood before them, but no one drank.

  But Nelson had something on his mind; he had for days, since the night in San Felipe. He asked Henry about it now. He felt he was owed some clarification. “Have you been calling home?”

  The playwright smiled, saying nothing at first, but finally, he nodded.

  “I thought we weren’t doing that,” Nelson said.

  Patalarga laughed.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “Because I’ve been calling too.”

  The food came.

  As it turned out, the only one of the three protecting the integrity of “the play’s constructed universe” was Nelson. He lost his appetite. Henry and Patalarga found this very funny; Nelson, less so. They chided their friend playfully, trying to pull him from his bad mood, which they found entirely unreasonable. And perhaps they were right. How could he have been so literal? they asked, but he had no answers. The commitment Nelson had shown the project—something he’d been proud of only a moment before—was now a sign of gullibility.

  Patalarga attempted to explain away Nelson’s complaints: Henry had lied, yes, in the strictest sense, but this is what great directors do. They challenge their actors, prod them, force them against their will into a place of discomfort, in this way extracting some extra dose of magic for the performance. Isolated, mournful, longing for home—this was Nelson, the actor, at his best.

  “Imagine a happy, well-balanced Alejo,” said Patalarga. “That would never do. I should tell you one day how he treated my wife, when she had your role.”

  Henry agreed. “Diana still won’t talk to me.”

  “This was what you wanted?” Nelson asked. “To make me unhappy?”

  “Sure it was. We needed you to be. For the play.” With that, he thrust a piece of chicken into his mouth.

  “But—”

  Henry’s face was covered in grease, and he chewed for a long, luxurious minute. He loved these moments, loved Nelson’s disappointment, in fact. Mentorship, such as he understood it, consisted primarily of didactic exercises like this one: transforming frustration into the building blocks of knowledge.

  “Please, my dear Alejito: did you really expect me not to talk to my daughter?” Henry said finally. “Or for the servant not to call his wife?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Who did you want to call?” Patalarga asked.

  Nelson rolled his eyes. “Now you want to know?”

  “We do,” said Henry, softening. “We really do.”

  Henry, later: “I loved Nelson. Of course I wanted to know.” After a pause: “I’m so sorry for what happened.”

  What did Nelson tell them?

  Concretely: about Ixta. How she’d walked away, how he’d let her. How his world was poorer without her. Blank. What he told them that night at the Wembley wasn’t true: he’d always wanted to leave, and he hated his brother for keeping him here. He even wanted to go now, and take Ixta with him. To start again. To try. This was what he’d realized on the tour. What he’d learned. He told them much more, Patalarga said to me later, many things which seemed to combine into a large, cosmic sort of complaint: a sadness pouring out of Nelson that began with losing Ixta, perhaps forever, but went much further. He was being condemned to a life he didn’t want. It scared him.

  “Naturally,” Henry told me, “this was a feeling I knew firsthand.”

  “Did you offer to cut the tour short?” I asked.

  The playwright shook his head. “That wouldn’t have solved anything.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “We told him to call her—what else? He loved her, and he knew he’d made a mistake. Talking to us about it wasn’t going to help. We left the restaurant, and walked until we found a call center. It was across the street from a park, so we found a bench and said we’d wait for him there. When Nelson came out, he looked dazed.”

  I told Ixta about this later: I thought she might want to hear that description, might find it illuminating to know the impact their conversation had on Nelson. It was the complement to what she’d been feeling at the beginning of the tour. That everything he’d said on the phone to her that night was true: he did miss her fiercely. He had found time to think. He did have a plan now, however vague, and it did include them both. A future existed, and it could be theirs. He loved her.

  She nodded as I spoke, betraying little curiosity at first, until a moment when I thought I saw a tear gathering in the corner of her eye. It didn’t last long. She was nothing if not composed, and an instant later, she’d brushed the tear away with the back of her hand. She cleared her throat and cut me off.

  “You don’t have to tell me this. I know.”

  She remembered Nelson’s phone call very well, in fact: though the connection from San Jacinto was snowy with static, his voice was clear enough. He was at a call center, he told her, and the town was coming to life for the evening. It was around nine, and the streets were thick with people. Lovers. Thieves. There were moto taxis whirring by, and packs of little boys huffing glue in the nighttime chill.

  “It sounds lovely,” Ixta said. “Did you call to tell me about San Jacinto?”

  Silence for a moment. Then: “No.”

  “I should have stopped him,” she told me. “I shouldn’t have let him say anything. I already knew it didn’t matter.”

  But she couldn’t help it; she let him talk. It was painful to hear, Ixta admitted, and she was not unmoved.

  When he’d finished, she told him her news.

  “Do you think that had anything to do with what happened next?” I asked.

  Ixta gave me a blank look. She was very careful with her words: “I think Mr. Nuñez and his associate are the ones who should answer that. I wasn’t there.”

  I bent my head, pretending to look over my notes, but all the while, I could feel Ixta staring at me.

  “You know,” she added, “I don’t see why any of this matters now.”

  “It still matters to me,” I said, though if she’d asked me why I’m not sure how I would have responded.

  Just then her baby called out from the other room. Ixta excused herself to attend to the child, and I sat in her living room, wondering if I should gather my things and go. I didn’t. She came back a few minutes later with her little girl, wrapped in a pale yellow blanket.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Nadia,” Ixta said, and at the sound of her mother’s voice, the infant’s round green eyes popped open. “I’m here, baby,” Ixta purred, and Nadia breathed again,
sleepy. She spread her mouth into a cavernous yawn, as if trying to swallow the world, and then her eyes closed again; her face became small and peaceful.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said.

  Ixta nodded. “You can see for yourself she looks nothing like him.”

  10

  NELSON’S MOTHER ALSO RECEIVED a phone call that night, but whether it was before or after the conversation with Ixta is not known. Mónica doesn’t remember hearing anguish or heartbreak in his voice, but then again, she reminded me, her younger son was an actor, a boy who’d kept more than his share of secrets over the years. There’s another possibility: that she was so surprised and happy to have Nelson on the line, she simply overlooked any hints about his emotional state. In any case, Mónica is certain he didn’t mention Ixta—in fact, he hadn’t mentioned her for many months. It was as if this girl disappeared from his life. Mónica had liked Ixta well enough, and even felt responsible, indirectly, for the pairing, but Nelson was young, and these things happen. The heart mends. Life is long. When I told Mónica that they were still seeing each other, more or less, up until the date of Nelson’s departure, she was surprised.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “Really?”

  That night, Nelson and his mother spoke in very broad terms about the tour, about how he was getting along with his fellow actors. Nelson claimed to have learned a lot about his craft, and assured her he was enjoying being away. (Perhaps he had called his mother first.) He said he’d been thinking about his future.

  “What have you been thinking?” Mónica asked her son.

  He sighed. “That I should go, finally.”

  Nelson’s mother didn’t need this to be explained. She knew what “go” meant, understood the implicit destination. Nor did she disagree, really. “The tour was giving him perspective,” she told me, “and that was a good thing. Sebastián and I pushed him to leave for years, but after my husband died, all that was put on hold. I wondered if it was my fault, but Nelson never said anything. I should have kept pushing him, but the truth is, I was too tired. It was selfish, but I needed him.”

  “What did you tell him that night?” I asked.

  “That I supported him, no matter what he wanted to do. You know, the original plan was New York or California, but even San Jacinto was a step. For years, he’d never left the city. After Sebastián passed, he stayed by my side. His friends went on vacation, they piled in cars and went on camping trips down the coast. And he hardly ever went with them. And yes, maybe he resented me for it. So now, in a way, I was happy to hear him say he wanted to leave. I’d been waiting for it.”

  About the tour, Nelson told his mother the play was “a hit”—though he qualified this by saying that the word meant something different out there in the provinces. He laughed then, and Mónica recalls how beautiful her son’s laughter sounded to her. Nelson explained that successful shows might be performed before fifteen or twenty spectators, in ad hoc venues where the very concept of “a full house” didn’t apply. How, for example, does one “sell out” a windswept field at the edge of town? If every known resident is there, huddled together for warmth in the limitless space? If the tickets themselves cost nothing, does it even matter? If a few of the audience members raise their hands to ask questions in the middle of a performance—is this a good thing? And if you pause in the middle of a scene to answer these questions (as Henry had one strange night, “a presidential press conference,” he called it) is that really winning theater?

  “Yes,” Mónica recalls saying. She was enthusiastic: “It is!”

  She was not an old woman, not yet, but the last two months hadn’t been easy. She spent hours each day “tidying up”—this was the phrase she used, though it sounded more to me like a kind of archaeology, or an intensely personal subspecialty of that discipline: exploring one’s own solitude, as if it were a dark cave. She might sit reading a paperback Sebastián had given her in 1981, the handwritten inscription no longer legible, the letters fuzzy and blurred, but special all the same. How and why had he given it to her? What had he been trying to tell her? Had he imagined that she’d be reading the inscription twenty years later, when he was dead and she was alone? A weekend afternoon might find her refolding a dresser drawer full of Francisco’s old clothes, items she’d saved these many years for no reason she could recall, and then going to the old photo albums to verify that her elder son had actually worn them. It was as if she were fact-checking her own life. A full day could pass like this. She didn’t enter Nelson’s room, not yet, but felt certain that each night, as she slept, his things spread around the house of their own accord, to new and unexpected hiding places. Scripts appeared behind sofa cushions, a pair of laceless sneakers materialized in the pantry behind a bag of rice. Someone, she was sure, was moving the family pictures.

  Now she stood in the kitchen, holding the receiver with both hands.

  “How was your birthday?” Mónica asked.

  “Great.”

  “When will you be back?”

  From San Jacinto, Nelson rattled off the names of a few towns they hoped to visit in the coming weeks. It seems the word about Diciembre and its tour had spread, and many municipalities were interested in hosting them. The rains were ending, the festival season would soon be under way, and Henry had decided Diciembre would take advantage of these potentially large and boisterous audiences. Why wouldn’t they? Was there any hurry to come home?

  “Of course there isn’t,” Mónica said. “As long as you’re happy, that’s what matters.”

  “Are you doing all right, Mom?”

  She told Nelson she was fine.

  To me, she confessed: “I’d already had two months to begin imagining my life without him.”

  HENRY AND PATALARGA AGREE: When Nelson stepped out of the call center, he seemed a little stricken. They made room for him on the bench, but he opted to stand before them instead, hands buried in his pockets, chin to his chest.

  “What happened?” Henry asked, but Nelson didn’t answer, so they watched him, swaying left to right, looking down at his feet. A minute passed like this.

  “Are you going to say anything?” Henry asked.

  “Are you cold?” Patalarga said. “Should we go to the hotel?”

  “She’s pregnant,” Nelson answered, still looking down. His voice was soft, almost inaudible over the humming noise of the park where they sat. He looked up then, and they saw his helpless eyes, the puffy skin beneath them. He pursed his lips: he had the bewildered expression of a student trying to solve a problem he doesn’t quite understand.

  “The baby isn’t mine. That’s what she told me. I asked her how she knew, and she said she just did. I asked her if she’d taken a test, and she said that was none of my business.”

  “Women know these things,” Henry said.

  “I’m sorry,” Patalarga added.

  “She’s going to marry that other guy.”

  (Ixta is adamant that she never said this: “Nelson invented that. I’m sure he believed it, but Mindo and I never had plans to be married.” She found the idea laughable.)

  Henry stood and embraced his protégé.

  “Did he cry?” I asked.

  Henry frowned at the question in a way that suddenly embarrassed me. “No, I don’t think so, though I’m not sure why it matters.”

  So either Nelson cried or he didn’t. They spent the next few hours walking the streets of San Jacinto, rather directionless, trying to raise Nelson’s spirits. It wasn’t easy. Henry says he offered to cancel the next day’s show, but Nelson wouldn’t hear of it. The show must go on, et cetera, et cetera. Patalarga suggested they get drunk, an easy option, and cheap, considering the altitude; but Nelson shrugged off the idea. “He wasn’t into it,” Patalarga told me. “Everything we offered, he turned down. I think he just wanted us to keep him company.”

  “Did he say much?”

  “He asked if anything like this had ever happened to either of us.”

  In response,
Henry explained that heartbreak is like shattered glass: while it’s impossible that two pieces could splinter in precisely the same pattern, in the end, it doesn’t matter, because the effect is identical.

  “I suppose so,” said Nelson.

  To further prove the point, Henry told of his infidelities, from which he claimed to have derived no pleasure, none whatsoever, and his subsequent divorce. He did not mention Rogelio, not yet—though his old lover would be making an appearance, indirectly, that very same night. One could call it serendipity or coincidence or luck (which comes in two, often linked, varieties); one could also just call it life.

  Patalarga took up the argument, and told of his move at age seventeen from his hometown in the mountains to the city; and the girl he’d left behind.

  “What was her name?” Nelson asked.

  As it happens, I asked the same thing.

  Her name was Mercedes—Mechis—and they were madly in love. She wanted to believe he’d come back for her, and Patalarga was afraid to let her think any different. So they conspired to never speak of it, both assuming the other believed this fiction. In fact, neither of them actually did. Once in the city, Patalarga changed his name, changed his life. They wrote letters for a time, but these fizzled out. He was embarrassed to tell her about his new friends. He never forgot her, but something shifted: he’d be riding the bus to the university, and realize, suddenly, that he hadn’t thought of her in months. The longer this went on, the more ashamed he was. He didn’t go home for three years, by which time he was a different person entirely. When they saw each other the first time, he expected she’d yell at him, curse him, beat him with small, closed fists and ask him why. He was prepared for this, but what actually happened was much worse.