At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  “I’d never seen anything like it,” Patalarga said, with pride evident in his voice.

  I can picture it: down to the unsteady posture of Mrs. Anabel, suddenly frightened, suddenly curious. Heartbroken, but in some very deep place inside her, lonely enough to want to believe. It’s the drama of any family separated by space and time. I can see the way she stood with the help of her son, Jaime; the way she shuffled her feet toward Nelson, then paused, then shuffled some more. Mama, it’s me. According to Noelia, “It was like trying to coax a kitten from under the bed. He was very patient.” When Mrs. Anabel finally approached, Nelson held her very tightly against his chest. She was so very small, it was like holding a child.

  They must have stood there for three or four minutes, while the rest of them watched, awed by this scene they could hardly explain. “No one spoke,” Henry told me. “We couldn’t. Something special was happening, and we all knew that, even Jaime.”

  When the old woman had gathered herself, the questioning began. These questions were random, and for the moment, contained no skepticism at all. The skepticism would return later, flaring up unexpectedly, once or twice a day—but not just yet. It was as if a circuit had been suddenly connected.

  Did you go to school today, boy?

  Is your brother treating you nicely?

  Will you be going out to the fields with your father this afternoon?

  Are there big buildings where you live?

  How old are you now?

  Fortunately, there was no wrong answer to this final query, since Mrs. Anabel drew from all the periods of her life in conversation with her son, the stranger. He was a boy, an adolescent, a young man—all at once. Through it all, Nelson remained composed, good-humored, and generous. According to Noelia, “He performed marvelously. You almost wanted to applaud.”

  Mama, it’s me.

  Of course, one applauds at the end of a performance, not at the beginning.

  EVENTUALLY IT WAS TIME for Mrs. Anabel’s nap. It had been a satisfying performance; everyone could agree on that, and Mrs. Anabel’s joy at being reunited with Rogelio was undeniable. She’d given out a round of hugs before heading to bed, even to Henry, whose earlier visit she seemed to have either forgotten or forgiven altogether. Before Noelia took her to her bedroom, the elderly woman made Rogelio promise that he’d stay for dinner, and Nelson answered with a bright, noncommittal smile. Mrs. Anabel squeezed his hand, and said Noelia was preparing something special. “Your favorite.”

  A few minutes later, Noelia returned from her mother’s room to announce that the old woman was asleep. Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson stood to go. The daily bus back to San Jacinto left at two, and they were still in time to make it. The previous night’s tension seemed to have dissipated, and if the mood was not exactly friendly, there was something new: a sense of shared accomplishment. Even Jaime seemed pleased. They’d managed it, the five of them together, and now a previously troubled elderly woman was sleeping peacefully.

  “I’m glad we could help,” Henry said. He turned to Nelson. “You were wonderful.”

  “Thank you,” Nelson said.

  Noelia nodded her agreement. “I almost wish you could stay!”

  Everyone laughed but Jaime, who raised a hand, teasing the air rather vaguely. He had a pensive look. “Would you?”

  Nelson grinned. Patalarga too.

  “It’s not a bad idea,” Jaime said.

  Henry objected: “It’s a terrible idea.”

  “I’m not talking to you,” Jaime said. Then to Nelson: “Is it something you’d consider?”

  “Jaime.”

  He frowned. “Sister, let the boy talk.”

  Nelson cast anxious glances at Henry and Patalarga. “No. I wouldn’t consider it.”

  “That’s a shame. My mother likes you. You could do an old woman a lot of good.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  “I think you can.” He paused. “And I think you could, if you wanted. I can pay you. I can make it worth your while. Why don’t you give her a week. Think of it as a performance. You’ll do quite nicely. What’s the problem?”

  Henry saw in Jaime’s smile the seriousness of the proposal. This wasn’t a suggestion at all, but a command.

  “You’re serious?” Nelson asked.

  “He is,” Henry mumbled.

  “You can’t be.”

  “I am,” Jaime said.

  Noelia couldn’t believe her offhand comment had led to this. Her brother’s idea was appalling—but it was also marvelous. To have company. To have a guest. Jaime visited only rarely, and never brought his wife or his children. The idea of being accompanied, she admitted to me later, sounded intoxicating. She couldn’t hide her enthusiasm, nor did she try.

  “We’ll set you up in his old room,” she said to Nelson. “I’ll clear it out, and you’ll be very comfortable there.”

  “I didn’t say I was staying.”

  Henry rubbed his eyes. “You’re staying,” he said, defeated. He’d intended to communicate the futility of arguing, but it sounded instead as if he were turning on his friend.

  “Henry!” Patalarga said.

  Henry turned to Jaime. “We’ll wait for him. Stay in town, but out of sight. She won’t even know we’re here.”

  Jaime shook his head. “I don’t want you in my town. I want you as far away from my mother as can be.”

  “We’re not leaving our friend here,” Patalarga said.

  “Your friend will be fine. You’ll take good care of him, won’t you, Noelia?”

  She smiled innocently. “Of course.”

  Jaime clapped his hands together. “See?”

  “I’m not staying here. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You are,” Jaime said. “Let’s not argue about this. I don’t enjoy arguing.”

  It was an awful feeling, Patalarga told me later: “I looked at Nelson and then back at this violent man, and knew there was nothing we could do. Henry looked as if he might cry. It didn’t sink in right away, but then we knew. It was Nelson who put an end to it.”

  He held up his hands in surrender, the way you might if you were being robbed at knifepoint.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  THAT AFTERNOON, the three friends walked to the plaza, and said their good-byes in the shadow of the bus to San Jacinto. Jaime had come to watch, to verify that it all went according to plan, but he kept his distance, out of respect for the moment. Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson embraced, and Nelson asked his friends not to speak with his mother. “Better she doesn’t worry,” Nelson said, and they all agreed this was for the best. “I’ll be home soon.”

  Henry and Patalarga nodded.

  Then they boarded, and the bus pulled out, and just like that, Nelson was alone in T—. Now the tour has really surprised me, he wrote in his journal that night. It’s become my very own one-man show.

  As for Henry and Patalarga, they rode out of T— in silence. The views along the route were spectacular: sheer mountain faces, the sky almost unnervingly blue. There were wildflowers growing at the roadside, pushing out from the dry rock in exquisite and surprising shades. Halfway to San Jacinto there was a river to cross, and when they turned the last switchback before the bridge, they came to a stopped line of trucks. Their engines were off, and many of the drivers were out of their vehicles, standing along the edge of the road in groups of three or four, caps pulled low over their eyes, smoking.

  They could go no farther. The bus stopped too, and all the passengers got out.

  It seemed a small van had collided with a truck full of mangoes just sixty meters beyond the bridge. “If you walk up to the edge, you can see it,” one of the men said with a shrug, and Henry and Patalarga, along with a few others, moved in that direction.

  The scene was grisly. The remains of the van were strewn down the side of the gulch, metal twisted and bent like a crushed toy. Pieces of the windshield glinted in the sun, and one of the tires had come to rest at the
water’s edge. It was impossible, at that distance, to make out any human remains, but the rumor circulating among those gathered at the lip of the drop-off was that there were no survivors. Some of the kids were crying; their mothers tried to comfort them. “Don’t look,” Henry heard a woman say to her boy, as the child peeked anxiously through his fingers. The only witness to the crash was the driver of the mango truck, who was still in shock. Someone said a medical team from San Jacinto was on its way.

  Henry walked back toward the bus. Accidents like this happen all the time, but somehow in all his travels he’d been spared seeing one up close. He felt sore all over, in his jaw, in his back, in his hips. It wasn’t overwhelming pain, just enough to make him feel old.

  A few moments later, Patalarga returned. “Three hours, at least,” he said. “Get comfortable.” They stood by the roadside, looking out over the valley. “Are you all right?”

  Henry answered with a nod.

  “Our friendship began to unravel then,” Patalarga told me later, “just when it should have been strengthened. I tried to talk to him, but he was hard to reach. I thanked him for last night, for telling us everything. I got no response. I told him not to worry about Nelson, that he’d be fine, and he just shrugged.”

  Henry doesn’t exactly dispute this. “The wreck put me in a mood. The wreck and everything else. I couldn’t help it, but I felt like he was judging me.”

  “But Patalarga was your best friend,” I said.

  “That’s true,” Henry told me, “and it also isn’t true. You get to an age when that phrase isn’t quite what it used to be. There is no best friend role waiting to be filled. You’re alone. You have a life behind you, a series of disappointments, and perhaps a few things scattered ahead that might give you pleasure. I wasn’t happy. What else can I tell you? I felt like a failure. I lost everything in Collectors. And in T—, I’d felt for a moment like I might be able to get it back. I wasn’t worried for Nelson, but there was no escaping the reality of it: we were going home without him.”

  This was our third interview. He was thin and unshaven, with a grayish pallor, and had deteriorated even in these few short weeks since we’d first spoken. He’d just told me a version of what he told Nelson and Patalarga the night before their departure—the story of Rogelio. It was summer on the coast, and the windows of his half-furnished apartment had been thrown open, the curtains pulled. The room was filled with light, but Henry slumped in his chair as if he’d just woken from a nervous sleep. A fan whirred in the corner. I had the sense we were acting out the very scene he was describing: metaphorically, there we were, he and I, standing by the side of the road high in the mountains, observing the wreckage. Only in this case the wreckage was him.

  It was almost dusk when the traffic on the road to San Jacinto finally began to move again. All the cars and trucks and buses and vans followed in a long, slow procession, rolling along as a block, never more than a few car lengths between them, as if by riding together, they could steel themselves against the impact of the accident they’d just seen. They arrived in San Jacinto that evening, in time to catch a night bus to the coast. Everyone was tired; nerves were raw. Henry and Patalarga bought their tickets, and waited.

  Even at that late hour, the station was manic. There were children everywhere, Patalarga remembers, not children who were traveling, but children working the station: selling cigarettes or shoe shines or simply begging. Below the constant noise, if you concentrated, you could hear the dull buzz of the fluorescent lights. Everyone looked like wax dummies. I can’t wait to leave this place, Henry thought. We can’t possibly leave soon enough.

  At nearly one in the morning, the bus was ready to board. Before it pulled out, the passengers were videotaped, this time by a girl of fifteen wearing a tank top and a pair of unnaturally tight jeans. She had black hair, a moon face, and was shy. Perhaps half the people on board had heard the news of the deadly crash at the bridge, and as a result the taping was more somber than usual. No one waved, no one smiled; they peered into the camera’s glass eye without blinking, as if searching for a loved one on the other side.

  Henry didn’t even face the girl, but turned instead toward the window.

  “Hey,” she said, “over here,” but the playwright didn’t respond.

  Patalarga shrugged an apology on behalf of his friend. “I’d never seen Henry like that,” he told me later.

  After a few seconds the girl moved on, muttering complaints under her breath.

  They hadn’t been on the road long before Henry turned to Patalarga. He wore an expression of worry, or even heartbreak.

  “I guess that’s it,” Henry said to his friend, his voice low.

  Patalarga had been on the verge of sleep. “Yeah?”

  “The tour’s over.”

  The two friends didn’t speak again until morning.

  PART THREE

  16

  NELSON WAS GIVEN what was simultaneously the largest and smallest room in Rogelio’s family home: the largest in terms of sheer physical space; the smallest because it had become, in recent years, a de facto storage locker. The rusty bunk bed where Jaime and Rogelio once slept now served as the essential infrastructure holding, but not containing, the family’s history in objects: bundled, precariously balanced, stacked from floor to ceiling, the remains of twenty-five years, thirty years, five decades of life in T—. In this house. Nelson spotted an old sewing machine, a teetering heap of newspapers from the seventies, a dead man’s mothballed clothes. There was an overstuffed cardboard box sitting on the lower bunk, with a dented teakettle and a few cracked wooden kitchen spoons peering out from the top. There were mismatched shoes beneath the bed; a couple of soccer balls, deflated and ripped open; bent wire hangers linked together like a makeshift cage; a box of marbles; and a child’s tricycle that appeared to have been taken apart violently. Nelson even saw a few of the old sculptures Rogelio had made out of wood.

  Together, it was something to behold. Had it stood in a museum or an art gallery, the critics would have been unanimous in their praise.

  Noelia must have noticed Nelson’s expression, or the sharp breath he drew at the sight of it all.

  “We don’t throw anything away,” she said. “We just don’t. I’m not saying this is a good or a bad thing.”

  Nor could Nelson decide.

  Rather than attempt to make space on the lower bunk, Noelia had Jaime and Nelson bring in a cot, along with three heavy blankets that smelled powerfully, but not unpleasantly, of woodsmoke. She was eager to get her guest settled in. “Go ahead, give it a try,” she said, standing in the doorway, and watched as Nelson lowered himself carefully onto the cot. The fabric sank beneath his weight, like a hammock, but it held.

  “Not bad,” he said.

  “Lie down.”

  Nelson flipped his legs onto the cot. His toes hung just off the edge. “It’s fine,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, but it’s the best we can do for now.”

  “It’s fine,” Nelson repeated. “Really.”

  It was early evening, and Mrs. Anabel was resting. It had been a big day for her. The temperature was dropping, so Jaime, Noelia, and Nelson moved to the main visiting room, that dark and dusty place where Henry had first been received. The family photos were right where he’d said they’d be. Nelson glanced back at his hosts, as if for permission.

  “Go ahead,” Jaime said.

  Nelson nodded, and searched the menagerie of black-and-white images, the faces blurred, but recognizable. Young Jaime, young Noelia, and the youngest, Rogelio, he assumed. He examined that face most carefully of all, looking for some resemblance that might explain his own presence in this strange home, in this strange town. They looked nothing alike, which was both a relief and a disappointment. It felt unsettling to be suddenly so connected to a dead man. There were a few scenes from the plaza, from the days when T— had been alive. There was one photo of the family stepping out of the cathedral, dressed in their finest, Mrs. Ana
bel’s stern late husband with an arm around his wife, and a date scrawled in the corner of the image: May 1970. Nelson studied the old man’s face, an opaque, unreadable mask; it was the face of a man accustomed to suffering. Husband and wife both wore this expression, in fact; but the children clustered about them—two smiling, irrepressible boys, plus one prim and beautiful little girl—did not.

  “What a lovely family,” Nelson said.

  Noelia smiled. “Yes, we were. My mother thinks we still are.”

  “We made a good team,” Noelia told me later. In spite of how it ended, she had fond memories of Nelson’s time in T—. “I told him everything I knew. Not just that night, but every day I added something, every day I remembered. He helped me, just by being there.”

  Noelia began that evening by explaining Mrs. Anabel’s peculiar sense of time, the seven or eight key events which her mind played in a continuous and maddening loop, and the connective tissue between them. For example, it might be necessary to understand how the death of Rogelio’s father related to the 1968 earthquake. Noelia explained to Nelson (and later to me) that something in the chemistry of the soil changed after the quake, and the small plot he’d saved up years to purchase became suddenly infertile. The old man all but gave up hope after that. Though he didn’t die until a few years later, as far as Rogelio’s mother was concerned, he’d started to die at the moment of the earthquake.

  “You would’ve been five in 1968,” Noelia told Nelson, like a schoolgirl slipping answers to her favorite classmate. “And almost eight when my father finally passed.”

  She kept on, and Nelson took notes. Jaime was mostly quiet, nodding now and again, or correcting Noelia’s dates. Together, brother and sister conjured this memory: they’d last been together, all three of them, at a party in San Jacinto in the early 1980s. Neither could remember what they were celebrating, or why Noelia had been visiting the provincial capital. They remembered this: the sun setting, the three of them and perhaps a half dozen friends in a circle of plastic chairs on the unpaved street in front of Jaime’s house. It had rained the night before, and the chairs sunk and waddled in the soft earth. Music played from a handheld radio, they swapped stories, pulled bottles of beer from a bucket full of ice. Friends came by all through the night, and Rogelio was quiet—“He was always quiet,” Noelia said—until a certain song came on the radio, something bouncy and pop. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he stood up and started dancing.