At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  All afternoon, since Henry’s visit, Noelia had known it was true. She’d known it as she put her frantic mother to bed, as she raced across the plaza, as she waited for her brother to arrive. A stranger does not appear and announce a death by mistake. Very few people are cruel in this way, and Henry had not struck her as cruel. He’d looked at the photo of Rogelio and claimed not to know him—and it was this act of mercy which made her like him, in spite of everything. It was also the moment that had confirmed his story.

  For an actor, this man was not a good liar.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked her brother, the one she still had left.

  But Jaime didn’t answer. He wanted to know one thing. “Who told you? Who was this person?”

  “He said his name was Henry,” Noelia answered.

  “And where is he?”

  “At the auditorium. They told me in town he was in a play tonight.”

  “A play?” Jaime frowned. There was a moment of silence, and then: “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill that faggot motherfucker.”

  Noelia looked up. There was hatred in his eyes. She understood then that her brother knew this stranger, this Henry. And it frightened her. She began to cry. Her brother watched her without speaking. He didn’t reach out to her, and Noelia attempted to cry quietly, so as not to disturb him.

  They spent many minutes like this, but by a quarter to eight, Jaime was unclenching his jaw, drawing his creaky wooden chair closer to his sister, and telling her he was sorry. These were not words he said every day. She bowed her head, wiped her tears, and accepted his apology.

  “What will we tell mother?” she said.

  “Nothing,” Jaime answered. “We won’t be telling her a goddamn thing.”

  They left shortly after, closing the door carefully so as not to wake Mrs. Anabel. It was a cold night, and the quarter moon was just beginning to rise above the edge of the mountains. By the time they passed through the doors of the municipal auditorium, Diciembre had come to my favorite scene in The Idiot President. In it, the president is having his correspondence read aloud. The letters come from the country’s citizens, and they all begin with a long list of fairly standard honorifics: Your Highness, Your Honor, Your Benevolence. The president listens (or pretends to listen) to the appeals—pleas for work, for relief, for mercy, for land, for refuge—but he is unmoved. His posture is regal, his bearing severe. “Statuesque,” says the note in the script. Alejo, Nelson’s character, the idiot son, and Patalarga’s, the servant, take turns reading one letter each, while the president files his nails and brushes his hair. Over the course of the scene, a kind of competition arises between the son and the servant. Who can read better? Who can make this routine act more pleasing and more interesting to the president? Henry’s character, naturally, doesn’t notice at all, or pretends not to notice, but we do: the idiot son and the servant shoot each other angry, jealous looks and begin to read over each other, interrupting. The lists of honorifics preceding each letter becomes longer, and more ridiculous, until it’s clear that Alejo and the servant are simply making them up. Their voices grow louder, and the increasingly bizarre titles are delivered rapid-fire—

  “To our dear leader, personification of the nation’s purest desires!

  To the bright sun of liberty, most high and most alarming!

  To the most chaste and supreme one, munificent, magnificent, and beneficent!”

  —words tumbling out and overlapping, until it’s just a jumble, no longer discernible words but only noise.

  “They watched the whole scene without sitting,” Eric told me. “I noticed them because Henry had asked me about Noelia.”

  What were they thinking?

  Or more specifically, what was Jaime thinking?

  Though he’d lived in San Jacinto for more than two decades, Rogelio’s older brother was a well-known figure in town. He’d done well for himself, made money—and nothing earned the people’s respect like money. That night of the play in T—, he stood beside his sister with his arms crossed, squinting at the stage, staring intently at Henry. He hadn’t seen the playwright in fifteen years, but he knew it was him. He had no trouble recognizing that face, those gestures, that posture.

  According to Henry, they’d met only once, in Collectors, a scene I imagine Jaime was playing over in his mind. A winter’s day in 1986, in the yard of Block Seven. Jaime had come from San Jacinto to see his brother. He spent a few hours with Rogelio, strolling up and down the yard. Seen from a distance, they were like fish caught in a current, Rogelio and Jaime and all the others. Henry had been watching them all afternoon. Then visitors’ hours were almost over, and as the two brothers were saying their good-byes, Henry couldn’t resist any longer. “I’m not sure why or how,” he told me later, “it just came out.” Perhaps he was hurt that he hadn’t been introduced, though he found that hard to admit. He barreled toward them now, furious, protective, jealous, catching both brothers by surprise.

  This is what he said to Jaime that afternoon in 1986, in a voice far too loud for Collectors:

  “You need to take better care of your brother.”

  Jaime frowned. “I’m sorry?”

  “You owe him that. I know what you do.”

  “Who’s this?” Jaime asked his brother.

  “No one,” said Rogelio.

  There was no time for that betrayal to sting. Henry had already gone too far. “It doesn’t matter who I am. I know who you are. You’re the reason he’s in here.”

  Jaime glared at this stranger. To his brother, he said, “Get this idiot away from me.”

  “That’s enough, Henry.”

  It was more than enough, but he couldn’t stop. He was shouting now: “You have the money. I know what you do!”

  Jaime shook his head, then he threw a punch at Henry, landing it on his jaw. Henry staggered and fell. Jaime threw an arm around Rogelio, and together they walked to the gate of Block Seven. Jaime never visited Collectors again. Rogelio didn’t speak to Henry for three days.

  Now, onstage at T—’s municipal auditorium, the president accepted tribute from his son and his servant. As the scene devolved into noise, Jaime and Noelia found a place to sit.

  “Who is he?” Noelia whispered to her older brother, but Jaime didn’t respond.

  For Noelia, the next forty minutes were something of a revelation. She’d never seen a play before, except the ones the schoolchildren put on every spring to commemorate the founding of the town. This particular play wasn’t necessarily easy to follow, and as the scenes barreled toward their conclusion, she began to wonder about the young lead. He was handsome, she thought, and it occurred to her he was the same age as Rogelio had been the last time she saw him. That was all. It was an idle thought. They didn’t look alike; it’s just that Nelson was an odd sight in a place like T—. He was a young man in his twenties with a drifting gaze and bad posture. He looked lost, and perhaps this is why she thought of her missing, suddenly dead, brother.

  Perhaps it was something else; when pressed, Noelia admitted she didn’t really know. “There was something about him,” she said, and that was all she could manage.

  Meanwhile Jaime sat by her side, stone-faced. The actors floated back and forth across the stage, recited their lines, made their jokes, and the audience laughed, or shouted with joy, or fell into a meditative hush. Jaime was unmoved. The play’s climax, when Nelson’s character chats up the servant, tricks him, and then kills him—this was particularly powerful that evening, and the audience responded with gasps that could be heard all over that chilly auditorium. According to Eric, there were even some tears. When asked if it was Diciembre’s best performance of the tour, Patalarga was unequivocal. “Of course,” he told me. “Nelson’s anger that night was real. And Henry’s despair was too.”

  Noelia agreed: “It gave me chills.”

  The play ended ten minutes before nine in the evening, to sustained applause.

  There was no one to close t
he curtain, so the three actors spent a moment onstage, smiling and waving at the audience. Then the clapping died down, and most of those in attendance headed toward the exit. But not everyone. Not Jaime. He stood, lingered in place for a moment, rocking side to side almost imperceptibly and never taking his eyes off the stage.

  “Are you all right?” Noelia asked.

  Her brother nodded.

  “Should we go, then?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Please,” said Noelia. “Don’t hurt anyone.”

  Jaime turned to her then. There was a look in his eyes that she couldn’t place, almost like pity.

  Then he walked straight forward, pushing through the metal folding chairs that stood between him and the performers. I imagine something akin to a parting of the waters, the chairs clanging this way and that, Jaime cutting a rough path through them with long, heavy steps. Eric, still lingering along the wall, thought the gesture was rude, but chose not to say anything. It was Jaime, after all. You didn’t say anything to Jaime.

  Nelson, Patalarga, and Henry had begun to gather their props: the scattered letters; the presidential scarf used to mimic a hanging in the third scene and then tossed off to the side at the beginning of the second act; the flimsy but surprisingly realistic plastic knife used in the murder scene. The houselights had come on, but they were weak, and none of the actors noticed Jaime until he was standing before the stage. He called Henry by name. Noelia hadn’t moved from her seat. She saw the whole thing.

  “He said something to the president, the one who’d come to see us.”

  Henry knelt down until they were almost at eye level with each other. They exchanged a few words.

  “I saw my brother nodding. Then I saw the president’s expression drop. He was facing me, you see. He went pale. My brother grabbed him by the collar, pulled him from the stage, and tossed him to the floor.” She paused and took a deep breath. “At that point everything got very confusing.”

  From the corner of his eye, Patalarga saw Henry tip off the stage. “My first thought was that he’d fallen, that it was an accident.” He hadn’t really paid much attention to the man Henry was talking to, but then he heard a shout.

  Jaime had Henry on his back (once more, all these years later), but this time, he got six or seven good kicks in before anyone could respond. “I jumped off the stage and tried to grab the guy, but he shook me off,” Patalarga told me later. “It was the second time in five hours that I’d had to defend Henry.” For his trouble, he caught an elbow to the face.

  Patalarga lunged at Jaime again, and by this time Nelson and Eric had rushed over too; together they were able to pull him away. Jaime was shouting, struggling against them, but no one seems to recall what he was yelling.

  They all remember Henry though, the shock of him: the president lay on the floor, writhing and covering his face with his bloodied white gloves. His lip was busted, his nose broken. There was blood on his chin, and though he didn’t know it yet, two of his ribs were cracked. He lay on his back, taking shallow breaths; after a moment, he opened his eyes. The lights above blurred in and out of focus.

  And all the while, Noelia sat frozen in her seat. It was extraordinary, the weight she felt, the absolute impossibility of moving. She held her hands tightly in her lap, and gave in to it. Everyone else had gone. This was all part of the play, an extra scene performed just for her, as if to reveal some special secret. This was why they all fear my brother, Noelia remembers thinking. This is why they’re scared of him. Maybe those stories she’d heard were true, after all.

  Nelson, Patalarga, and Eric held Jaime, while Henry got to his feet, holding the edge of the stage to steady himself. The prop knife was there, just an arm’s length away, and he grabbed it. With that, Henry turned to face his attacker once more, brandishing it with surprising conviction.

  “Come on!” Henry shouted. He was manic, dancing back and forth, and carving the air with his plastic knife. His voice echoed through the nearly empty auditorium. “Come on, you asshole!”

  For all Henry’s fury, there was no threat in the spectacle. Jaime eased, and his captors instinctively relaxed with him. They still held him, but without the same force or fear or urgency. Patalarga was afraid his old friend might faint before them.

  “Okay,” Jaime said. “Enough. If I wanted to kill this piece of shit, I would’ve done it already.”

  He shook himself free. Eric, Nelson, and Patalarga backed off.

  At that, Henry stopped. Out of breath, he dropped both arms to his side, still gripping the knife in his left hand. He and Jaime locked eyes.

  “Tell me you remember me now,” Jaime said. “Go ahead. Think real hard.”

  Henry nodded. “You’re Rogelio’s brother.”

  “Good,” said Jaime.

  Henry bowed his head. He dropped the plastic knife, and with his sleeve wiped a thin line of blood from his chin. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Jaime raised an eyebrow. “Are you?”

  Noelia was still pegged to her seat, watching it all. Henry called out in her direction: “I’m sorry! I’m very sorry!”

  It was at this point that she finally snapped to. It was not a play after all; it was real, and once again that strange man was talking to her. His voice, shouted across the auditorium, was ghostly. She stood, and as she rearranged her shawl, noted that they were all looking at her: these men, her brother, the actors, the mayor’s deputy. She took a deep breath and walked down the path Jaime had made only a few moments before, through the carelessly strewn metal chairs, to the foot of the stage, where the lights shone brightest. As she got closer, it was as if the air changed. There was heat pulsing off these men, the lingering remains of the fight. She saw Henry up close and gasped. His right eye had begun to swell, and his shirt was ripped at the collar. He leaned against the stage, as if he might tumble over at any moment.

  She turned to her brother.

  “Shame on you!”

  Jaime shrugged and looked down at his hands, his knuckles, the way one might admire a well-built tool or a machine.

  There was quiet.

  MUCH LATER I asked Henry about that night. This was back in the city, months after the events recounted here had run their course. I was trying to piece it all together based on versions provided by Patalarga, Noelia, and to a lesser extent, Eric. As for Henry, his recollections were cloudy. He talked at great length about his recovery, the slow easing of pain over the weeks that followed that night; but the play, the fight, its immediate aftermath, that, he said, was all a blur.

  Instead he talked about fight scenes in general. The fake kind. He talked about how they are staged; and he seemed more comfortable speaking this way, in the abstract. Like any scene involving large numbers of cast members, Henry told me, fight scenes are complicated and unwieldy. A good one must mimic chaos without being chaotic, must be confusing without being confused. The crowd must delight in the tension, while the actors themselves are perfectly relaxed. Henry ran his fingers through his hair, and leaned forward, briefly animated, evidently pleased with this series of contradictory phrases. Did I get it? Did I understand?

  And I began to wonder if he saw it all as a performance. If that night, when the play ended and the attack began; when his past, as represented by Jaime, stood before him, and his friends demanded answers; at that point, was he conscious of himself as a performer?

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Jaime kicked the shit out of me. I fell to the ground. I grabbed a plastic knife. I wanted to defend myself. I wanted someone to save me. Is this performing?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  Henry rubbed his face. He stood from his seat, and raised his shirt with his left hand. “There were bruises here,” he said, pointing to his stomach and chest. “And here. And here. These two ribs”—he pinched one and then the other—“these two were broken.”

  “I know. That’s not my question. I didn’t say you were faking it.”

  He frowned. “So what ar
e you asking, then?”

  “When it was over, were you aware that a delicate negotiation had begun? Were you careful as you were playing it?”

  “Of course I was careful. I was scared this man might kill me.”

  That night, Jaime wore a grimace, aloof and distant. He wasn’t handsome, Patalarga told me later, but he had “an interesting face.” His too-small mouth stayed closed, lips pressed together with the hint of a smile. People were afraid of him and he enjoyed that. His sleek black hair had gone wild in the skirmish, but he didn’t mind.

  “I guess we were expecting him to say something,” Patalarga said, “but he didn’t.”

  Instead, it was Noelia who spoke, addressing her brother: “Do they know too?” she asked, her voice desperate. “Do they know Rogelio is dead? Does everyone know but me?”

  Patalarga responded. “Madam, I can assure you we don’t know anything.”

  She looked at them all skeptically. Her brother and Henry nodded.

  “Just to be clear, Rogelio is …?” asked Nelson.

  “My little brother,” Noelia said.

  “My cell mate,” said Henry. “My friend.”

  The six of them made a wary circle, with Jaime pushing in close so they could feel the threat of him. Eric fidgeted. Nelson picked the plastic knife off the floor, and wiped its flimsy blade against his leg. It was Eric who told me this detail: he found it was almost tender, the way the actor cared for this prop, the way he wiped the blade as if it were real. During the performance, when Alejo murders the servant, Eric had been impressed. He remembers thinking: He looks like he could use it, and for next few minutes, Eric said, while they all spoke, Nelson held the knife at the ready, as if he might.

  “How’s your mother now?” Henry asked.

  “She was in a fit all afternoon,” Noelia answered. “I had to give her a sedative, the poor thing.”

  “She’s ill?” asked Patalarga.

  “She was fine until he came,” Jaime said.

  Noelia interrupted. “No. No no no no no. That isn’t true, Jaime. It just isn’t.” Her shoulders were shaking now. “Mama’s been faltering. She doesn’t remember. She talks to our father all the time and he’s been dead for years. She doesn’t know the difference. But when you said Rogelio was dead … Well, you know what happened.”