At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  That would come later, and almost by accident; at first, they were friends. But even before that, they were strangers. Henry’s family had tried to arrange a private cell, but none were available. He knew he should be grateful for what he had—many others were in far worse condition—but under the circumstances, he found it difficult to muster much gratitude. For the first few days, he hardly stirred. He didn’t register Rogelio’s face or his smile, and he knew nothing of his new home, beyond what he’d managed to glean on that initial terrifying walk. Henry was given the top bunk, and for three days he slept long hours, or pretended to sleep, facing the wall. Thinking. Remembering. Trying to disappear. He didn’t eat, but he felt no hunger. The night of his arrest had been cataloged, divided into an infinite series of microevents: he remembered each flubbed line of the performance, the expressions on the faces of the audience members who’d expected and hoped for better, every heated word that had been exchanged immediately after the show between him, Diana, and Patalarga. Could any of those details shift slightly, just enough to alter the outcome? Was there a light revision one could make to that evening’s script so that it would not end with him—he was Henry Nuñez, for God’s sake!—here, in Collectors?

  Those three days, Rogelio, with whom he’d hardly spoken, came and went, seemingly uninterested and unconcerned by Henry’s well-being. But by the fourth day, Rogelio had had enough. He tapped Henry on the back.

  “You’re allowed to get up, you know.”

  These were his first words, and Henry could hear the smile with which his cell mate had said them. As a director, he’d often found himself exasperated with the performance of an anemic actor who refused to bring his character to life. He’d say, “I want you to recite this line with a fucking smile! I want to be able to close my eyes and hear you smiling!”

  Now Henry turned.

  “You’re alive,” Rogelio said.

  “I guess.”

  “You can get up. You can walk around. You can talk to people. This isn’t solitary confinement. People live here, you know. If you’re going to stay, you’re going to have to realize that.”

  That afternoon Henry took his first real walk through the block. He met a few people who would later become friends, or something like friends; and he saw much to remind him of the danger he was in. There were men covered in scars and blurry tattoos, men whose faces seemed congenitally unable to smile, men who locked eyes with him, and spat on the ground. When he shuddered, they laughed.

  Rogelio wasn’t talkative, but he was helpful, and explained many things that day. According to him, Henry was lucky—it was clear he wouldn’t have to work (“You’re rich, aren’t you?” Rogelio asked), but almost everyone else inside did. Rogelio did plumbing, repaired broken plastic chairs (he shared a workshop on the roof with a few other men), and made pipes out of bent metal scraps, which he sold to the junkies. The junkies were everywhere, a miserable lineup of half-dead who roamed the prison, offering sex or blood or labor for their fix. Rogelio wasn’t proud of this work, but without it, he wouldn’t survive. His brother sent money only occasionally, enough to cover the cost of the cell and little else. Otherwise he was on his own. His mother hadn’t even come to visit, he said, and though his voice was firm as he spoke, Henry could tell this weighed on him.

  Neither Henry nor Rogelio owned the cell where they slept. It belonged to the boss, Espejo, who made extra money on visiting days by renting it out so that men could be alone with their wives. Those days will be difficult, Rogelio warned. They’d have to be out of doors all day, and in the evening, the room smells different, and feels different. You know someone has made love there, and the loneliness is infinite.

  Henry nodded, though he couldn’t understand; would not understand, in fact, until he had to live through it himself. There was a lot to learn. There were inmates to steer clear of, and others whom it was dangerous to ignore. There were moments of the day when it was safe to be out; others when it was best to stay inside. The distinction didn’t depend on the time, but on the mood, which Henry would have to learn to read, if he hoped to survive.

  “How do you read it?” Henry asked.

  Rogelio had a difficult time explaining. It involved listening for the collective murmur of the yard, watching the way certain key men—the barometers of violence in Block Seven—carried themselves on any given day. Small things: Did they have their arms at their sides or crossed in front of them? How widely did their mouths open when they talked? Could you see their teeth? Were their eyes moving quickly, side to side? Or slowly, as if taking in every last detail?

  To Henry, it sounded impossible.

  Rogelio shrugged. “Remember that most of us here are scared just like you. When I first came, I didn’t have a cell. If there was trouble, I had nowhere to go.”

  They were sitting in a corner of the yard, beneath a dull gray winter sky. The light was thin, and there were no shadows. Henry had been inside a month now, and still didn’t understand quite how it had happened. Nowhere to go—he understood these words in a way he never could’ve before. He wrote letters to his sister every day, but they were cheerful, utterly false dispatches that didn’t account for the gloom he felt, or the fear. His letters were performances, stylized and essentially false outtakes of prison life. Inside he was despairing: This is what it means to be trapped. To be frightened, and to be unable to share that fear with a single soul.

  “You’ll get it,” said Rogelio. “It just takes time.”

  The frenetic daily exchange of goods and services went on about them. Two men waited to have their hair cut, sharing the same day-old newspaper to pass the time. A pair of pants, a couple of sweaters, and T-shirts stolen from some other section of the prison were on sale, the items hanging on a line strung between the posts of one of the soccer goals. Three junkies slept sitting up, with their backs against the wall, shirtless in the cold. Henry saw these men, and felt even colder.

  “Where did you sleep back then?” he asked. “Before you had a cell.”

  “Beneath the stairs,” Rogelio said, laughing at the memory. “But look at me now!”

  Henry did look.

  His new friend had a bright smile, and very large brown eyes. His skin was the color of coffee with milk, and he was muscular without being imposing. His clothes were mostly prison scavenged, items left by departing men, appropriated by Espejo or some other strongman, and then sold. Nothing fit him well, but he seemed unbothered by it. He kept his black hair very short, and wore a knit cap most of the time, pulled down low, to stay warm. These dark winter days, he even slept with it on. His nose was narrow, and turned slightly to the left; and he had a habit of talking low, with a hand over his mouth, as if sharing secrets, no matter how mundane an observation he might be making. His eyes sparkled when he had something important to say.

  As if we were accomplices, Henry thought.

  Visiting days weren’t so bad at first. His family and friends took turns coming to see him, the ones who could tolerate the filth, the overcrowding, the looks from the junkies. They left depleted and afraid; and most didn’t come back. Patalarga did. He visited twice during the first month, and twice the next month, one of only a handful of Diciembre sympathizers who risked it. The others sent messages of support, empty-sounding phrases that Patalarga dutifully relayed, but which made Henry feel even more alone. The idea of the prison performance of The Idiot President was likely hatched on one of these visits, though neither could recall exactly when.

  Patalarga had no memory of ever meeting Rogelio. His enduring image of these moments in Collectors involves Henry looking down at his feet, nodding, but not listening. “I wanted him to know we were with him, that we hadn’t forgotten him. But I don’t think he understood what was going on. What we were doing for him.” In truth, only one thing stood out. The smell of the place, Patalarga told me; that was what he remembered. “You could close your eyes and not see, cover your ears and not hear; but that smell, it was always there.”

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nbsp; Henry agreed: Collectors was fetid and unsanitary, and when you ceased to recognize the odor, it was because you were losing part of yourself to your environment. “Three weeks inside,” he told me, “and I didn’t even notice it.”

  But the hours immediately after the visitors had gone were the most difficult of the week. The prison never felt lonelier. It required a great collective energy to welcome so many outsiders, to put the best face on what was clearly a terrible situation. Collectors was falling apart, anyone could see that. The damp winters had eaten away at the bricks, and the walls were covered with mold. Every day new men were brought in. They were unchained and set free inside, made to fight for a place to sleep in the already overcrowded hell of Collectors. The terrorists just over the high fence from Block Seven sang without pause, and many men complained that their families were afraid to come. Family day, when women were allowed in, came on alternate Wednesdays, and these were brutal. By the end of the afternoon, everyone was worn out from smiling, from reassuring their wives and children and mothers that they were all right. (Fathers, as a rule, did not visit; most of Henry’s fellow inmates did not have fathers.) It wasn’t uncommon for there to be fights on those evenings. So long as no one was killed, it was fine, just something to relieve the tension.

  Nine weeks in, and Henry felt almost abandoned. Only Patalarga came. On family day, he was alone, as alone as Rogelio. Espejo rented out their cell, and in the evening, as each man lay on his bunk, Henry could still feel the warmth of those phantom bodies. Their perfumed scent. It was the only time the smell of the prison dissipated, though, in some ways, this other scent was worse. It reminded you of everything you were missing. Henry had been unable to convince any of the women he used to see to come visit him, and he didn’t blame them. He’d had nothing special with any of them, though at times his despair was so great that he could concentrate on any one of their faces and convince himself he’d been in love. As for Rogelio, he was far from home, and hadn’t had a visitor, male or female, in months.

  Jaime had come once, and would come once more before Rogelio died.

  There wasn’t much to say now, so the two men let themselves dream.

  “Did you see her?” asked Henry one evening after the visitors had all gone, and because Rogelio hadn’t, he began to describe the woman who’d made love on the low bunk that very day. She’d come to see an inmate named Jarol, a thief with a sharp sense of humor and arms like tense coils of rope. Henry talked about the woman’s ample curves, how delicious she looked in her dress—not tight, but tight enough. She had long black hair, doe eyes, and fingernails painted pink. She was perfect, he said, because she was: not because of her body or her lips, but because of the way she smiled at her husband, with the hungry look of a woman who wants something and is not ashamed. A man could live on a look like that.

  Henry said, “She didn’t care who saw.”

  He could hear Rogelio breathing. They were quiet for a moment.

  “What would you have done to her?” Rogelio asked. His voice was very low, tentative.

  This was how it began, Henry told me: speculating aloud about how he might spend a few minutes alone with a woman in this degrading, stifling space. He had no difficulty imagining the scene, and he could think of no good reason not to share it. How different was it? Just because there was another man in the room with him—why should it be different?

  He would have torn off that dress, Henry said, and bent her against the wall, with her palms flat against that stupid map of San Jacinto. He would have pressed his hard cock against her pussy, teased her until she begged him to come in. From the bottom bunk, Rogelio laughed. He would have made her howl, Henry said, made her scream. Cupped her breasts in his hands and squeezed. Is this why you came, woman? Tell me it is! Already Henry was disappearing into his own words. He had his eyes closed. The walls had begun to vibrate.

  “What else?” said Rogelio, his voice stronger now. “Go on. What else would you do?”

  When they finished, each on his own bunk that first time, both men laughed. They hadn’t touched, or even made eye contact, but somehow what they’d done was more intimate than that. For one moment, the pleasure of each had belonged to the other, and now everything looked different as a result. Something dark and joyless had been banished.

  Years later in T—, Henry told the story, and even allowed himself a smile.

  15

  HENRY, PATALARGA, AND NELSON arrived at the door of Mrs. Anabel’s house the next morning, at precisely nine. They hadn’t slept well, and it showed. Henry’s right eye had swollen nearly shut, his ribs still hurt, and he described his walk along the cobblestone streets of T— as a kind of teetering shuffle. “I was stumbling like an old man,” he said, and admitted that he might have toppled over but for Nelson, who steadied him all the way. The beating felt more severe that morning, and it wasn’t just Henry who noticed it. Nelson and Patalarga felt it too, an achy kind of hangover, as if they’d all been attacked.

  Noelia met the three men at the door, and observed them warily. She hadn’t expected them all to come, she said.

  “Is there a problem?” Patalarga asked.

  She crossed her arms. “I just don’t see why you all need to be here. She’s very old, you know.”

  Nelson was the one who answered, steady, firm, and respectful. He held his hands clasped behind his back, and leaned forward slightly, as if sharing a secret.

  “Madam, after last night, we really can’t let our friend go in there alone. I do hope you understand.”

  She considered them for a moment. Nelson, especially. She liked him, she told me later, from the first. From the moment she’d seen him onstage the night before.

  “My mother is waiting,” Noelia said finally, and led them out into the courtyard, where Jaime sat with Mrs. Anabel, talking in whispers. Both looked up when the members of Diciembre stepped out of the dark passage and into the light. Nelson was the first to emerge. The morning sun shone directly into his eyes.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Rogelio!” said Mrs. Anabel. Her face lit up. “We were just talking about you, son. Come, come, boy! Have a seat.”

  IF I WERE a different sort of writer, I might have discussed Mrs. Anabel’s dementia with an expert or two, tried to make some medical sense of what was happening to her mind. But I didn’t, in part because I suspect no psychiatrist could convincingly explain the abrupt twists and turns in her cognitive understanding. There was no logic. What I know about her unpredictable reactions I’ve learned from Noelia, who’d lived with her mother and her moods for years, attempting to decipher a pattern. By the time of these events, she’d given up.

  Noelia reports that her mother woke that morning refreshed, that she greeted Jaime as if it were no surprise at all to find him there, and asked him about his schoolwork. He told her he was out of school now, had been for many years, and was living in San Jacinto. To which Mrs. Anabel responded, “I was just telling your father I never liked that town.”

  She hadn’t been to the provincial capital in nearly twenty years.

  Jaime sighed.

  “Did you marry yet?”

  “Yes, Mama. You’ve met my wife.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Mrs. Anabel frowned. “I remember her now. The pretty one.”

  Noelia watched this exchange as she prepared breakfast. The morning chill hadn’t yet receded, and Jaime and her mother sat with heavy blankets draped over their laps. “I enjoyed that moment, in fact. It was good that Jaime see exactly the state our mother was in. He needed to know.”

  After breakfast, they settled in the courtyard. Mrs. Anabel held a cup of tea in her hands, and said she’d dreamed of Rogelio the night before. Jaime and Noelia braced themselves, but to their relief, Mrs. Anabel confessed she couldn’t remember any of the details.

  “It was very confusing, like all dreams. Sometimes I’m very confused.”

  Still, all things cons
idered, Mrs. Anabel seemed at peace, so much so that Jaime considered calling off Henry’s visit. He probably would have, but then his mother’s mood shifted once more. She had something to say, Mrs. Anabel told her children. It had been nagging her all morning. That man from yesterday might be on to something. She’d been unable to shake the feeling that it might be true: that her younger son might be dead.

  Jaime began to argue, but Noelia shushed him.

  “It just can’t be,” Mrs. Anabel said. “Have you talked to him? When was that? Are you sure? We’ll have to tell your father, but I’m afraid it will kill him.”

  This is the world Nelson walked into.

  “I was just a step behind him when the old woman called him Rogelio,” Patalarga told me later. “And I saw him freeze. Just for a moment. We froze too, in the dark still, in the hallway that led into the courtyard. I guess they do these kinds of improvisation exercises all the time at the Conservatory, and maybe that explains why he responded the way he did. I don’t think you could even call it a decision, because it wasn’t. He just reacted. He went with it.”

  The sun in Nelson’s eyes was like stage lights, I imagine.

  “Yes, Mama,” he said. “I’m here.”

  And then something else happened, which tilted the scene once more. At the sound of Nelson’s voice, Mrs. Anabel’s certainty began to fade, as if she were suddenly frightened by what she had conjured. Henry and Patalarga had stepped into the daylight, and perhaps this too gave her doubts. She squinted at this young man before her, the one she’d just called Rogelio, and couldn’t recognize him. “Is that you?” she said, and no one uttered another word until Nelson spoke again.

  “Mama, it’s me,” he said—he purred—repeating the words once and again, such that their sound and meaning began to soothe Mrs. Anabel. Mama, it’s me. Nelson stood in the courtyard, chest out, face full of love.

  Jaime, Noelia told me later, wore a look of utter bewilderment.