At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  Meanwhile, in the city, Ixta’s belly kept growing each day, and with it, she confessed to me, her anxiety. Nelson’s late morning walks took him, more often than not, to Mr. Segura’s store, where he ignored Jaime’s admonition and read the newspaper whenever it was available; and where, on no fewer than seven occasions, he managed to reach Ixta by phone. These mostly unwelcome incidents served only to deepen her unease. She knew what she knew about her baby, and still he tried to convince her that it was his. It had to be. “That was all he wanted to talk about,” Ixta said when we spoke. “He was obsessed. It wasn’t that the child couldn’t have been his. But she wasn’t. That’s all.”

  She occasionally succeeded in steering the conversation elsewhere; the truth was she enjoyed talking to him, and didn’t have the heart to hang up.

  “I should have, I know, but I just couldn’t.”

  As uncomfortable as those conversations could be, Ixta needed to hear Nelson’s voice; apart from being her lover, he had also been her friend. She was tormented by the usual set of questions: whether she was too young or too selfish to handle the responsibility of motherhood; whether she’d be a good parent, or even an adequate one; whether the maternal bond would be felt right away. Though it seems cruel to mention them now, given the events to come, Ixta had even begun to have doubts about Mindo, her partner, the father of her child, a man I never had the opportunity to meet. But this was all in the future: while Nelson was in T—, Ixta’s misgivings were only just taking shape. She’d begun to find Mindo rather unresponsive, insensitive to the idiosyncrasies of her pregnancy (which were not idiosyncratic but absolutely normal), and, in a broad sense, “unimpressive.” This last, unkind word was the very one she used, albeit reluctantly and only because I pressed her.

  “I don’t like to talk about him, not anymore,” she said, but then she went on: it was all part of a slow realization she’d had over the course of her second trimester, when her ankles began to swell and the night sweats interrupted her sleep. “A man should cause an impression,” she said. “He should leave you with something to think about. Without that, there’s no magic.”

  “Was there magic with Nelson?” I asked. “Was he impressive?”

  I knew the answer. It took her a moment.

  “Once you knew him, he was. Very much so. And I knew him well.”

  The changes in her body were some compensation for her melancholy: it was an aspect of the pregnancy she found dramatic and wondrous, confirmation that there was, undoubtedly, some sort of miracle taking place, even if that miracle sometimes made her recoil with fear. But there was a problem: while she’d never felt more beautiful in her life, this man of hers wouldn’t lay a finger on her. Her breasts had grown, her hips—she finally had the curves she’d always wanted—and Mindo scarcely seemed to notice. She found this simply unforgivable. He came home late, something he’d always done; smelling like the Argentine steak house where he worked long hours, just as he always had; only now she found it all intolerable. The odor of grilled beef was repellant. One evening in May, when she was four months pregnant, she asked him to shower before getting in bed. He agreed, with a frown. The next night, she asked him to do the same, and to her great surprise, she woke up the following morning at dawn, alone. It was a chilly early-winter day: she padded out into the living room in her socks, and found her unimpressive, unwashed man on the couch. He was asleep with his mouth open, still in his work clothes, still smelling of steak, his feet hanging off the edge.

  How else was she to interpret this except as an insult?

  Perhaps, I suggested, he was simply frightened. First-time fathers often are.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “It doesn’t really matter anymore.”

  I didn’t argue this point. “Did you think much about Nelson in those days?”

  She nodded. “Sure. Whenever he called, I thought about him. I was angry, I was hurt, but I thought about him. Sometimes fondly. Sometimes not. I missed him. I felt very alone.”

  “And when he called—did you feel less alone then?”

  “No,” she said. Her eyes closed very briefly, just an instant. “I resented the phone calls, but I looked forward to them too. The connection from that shit town of his, wherever he was, it was terrible. I couldn’t understand what he was doing.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wanted to talk to him, to tell him things, but he wouldn’t listen. He would never listen. That was always his problem.”

  MINDO, the putative father of Ixta’s child, Nelson’s rival, was an artist, a painter—and not a bad one, by all accounts. He was thirty-one years old that year, and worked as a waiter.

  It’s true he was not cut out for fatherhood. When I suggested to Ixta that he might have been afraid, I was merely repeating what many of his friends told me. To a person, they hated Ixta, and a few even blamed themselves for not helping Mindo escape her clutches sooner. I understood their anger, but their vision of Ixta was at odds with everything I knew about her. Still, I listened mostly, didn’t interrupt as they spoke.

  Mindo came from a working-class district of the capital known as the Thousands, and that’s where his artistic education began. He began painting murals when he was very young, only twelve, memorials to friends who’d passed away. Given the circumstances of the neighborhood (known colloquially as Gaza), this was steady work. Mindo was featured in Crónica, one of the city’s main newspapers, when he was only sixteen, a back-page feature under the headline “Teenage Artist Paints War Memorial.” In the photo he stands before one of his murals, a painted wall along Cahuide, one of the main arteries of his district. He has a heavy build, and looks much older than his age. He has stubble on his chin, and dark, piercing eyes. Like Nelson, Mindo has curly hair, but beyond that there is no similarity.

  Ixta and Mindo met in August 2000, when he opened a show at one of the newer galleries in the Old City. He was no longer painting murals but very detailed, stylized portraits of his old neighborhood friends, some of whom had been dead now for fifteen years. Mindo painted them as adults, as if they’d survived their troubled teenage years and skated past the dangers that had prematurely ended their lives: the drugs, the street battles, the allure of crime. It was speculative biography, in images. Some gained weight. Some lost their hair. Some wore suits and ties, or aprons, or soccer uniforms. Some went shirtless, showing off intricate tattoos. Some held diplomas and smiled proudly. It was simple, affecting work; in Mindo’s paintings, all these tough young men had lived, and by living had earned the right to be ordinary. Beneath each image was a brief text noting the age at which they’d died and the circumstances of their passing.

  The opening was very well received, most of all by Ixta, who spent the evening drinking glass after glass of wine and trying to get the artist to smile. It wasn’t easy, she told me: the ghosts of Mindo’s violent adolescence were on every wall in the gallery. But she persisted. And we know that in mid-September, Ixta gathered her things and moved in with him. We know Nelson was shaken by the news, and that many of Mindo’s friends expressed their concern. Who is this woman? What do you know about her?

  It was never a good match. Mindo was handsome and charming and troubled. He’d never been in a serious relationship before. It couldn’t have worked out, though it seems petty to assign blame for this now. Ixta, for her part, accepts much of the responsibility herself, while noting the ways in which he let her down after she got pregnant. Mindo was jealous and frightened by the responsibility that fatherhood entailed. We know he suspected that Nelson was still part of Ixta’s life. Though Mindo never had proof of the affair, he certainly had his doubts, and it seems he was relieved when Nelson joined Diciembre on tour.

  “Maybe he’ll stay gone,” he commented bitterly to a friend. That was in mid-June, when Nelson was newly arrived in T—, and things with Ixta were beginning to unravel.

  “Perhaps,” his friend said.

  They even toasted to the idea.

  Everyone agrees he didn’t deserve what happened
to him when Nelson came back.

  MEANWHILE, Mónica would have loved to have been in touch with her son, to have received those phone calls from T—, but she didn’t. She knew nothing of what was happening because her son didn’t call her even once. In fact, besides Ixta (who claimed to be uninterested), no one knew much about Nelson’s whereabouts, because neither Henry nor Patalarga shared the story. They expected him home in ten days at most, so there was really no point.

  Faced with this silence, Mónica daydreamed of her son on ad hoc, rural stages, images which inspired a mix of pride and anguish. In her mind, it was all a continuation of the tour he’d described from San Jacinto, a tour she felt might never end. And in a sense, it never did. Mónica didn’t compare Nelson’s adventures to Francisco’s, at least not consciously, though she found herself approaching both absences the same way. She’d acquired, over the years, a certain skill for projecting herself into the lives of her children, a talent all mothers have—it’s what allows them to intuit a child’s hunger, his frustration, his fear—but Mónica had honed it, by necessity. With Francisco, she’d managed to create memories where there were none, build an elaborate, and mostly factual, time line of his travels. She’d formulated opinions about all the major events of her son’s life, and of the friends he’d acquired and discarded along the way. She kept a catalog of certain details, and, having committed these facts to memory, felt reassured about herself as a mother: she knew, for example, where her elder son had spent each of his birthdays since he’d left her side in 1992, even though she hadn’t been present at a single one of these celebrations. It didn’t matter. She’d imagined herself there. In her mind, she’d eaten cake and helped blow out the candles (whether there had been cake or candles being entirely beside the point). The fact that she and Francisco were still close was something she felt proud of, an achievement not to be minimized. This isn’t as obvious or as simple as it might seem; every bond, even that of a mother and child, is breakable.

  If Mónica and Ixta had been in touch during those final weeks of Nelson’s absence, they might have had a lot to talk about.

  So now, with only the clue of Nelson’s last phone call from San Jacinto to guide her, Mónica began to consider the scope of Diciembre’s travels, and do what she’d always done, perhaps what she did best: fill in details where there were few to be had. Her younger son, her Nelson; he’d been gone about two months by then, longer than he’d ever been apart from her. Too long—though she felt guilty for begrudging him this adventure he’d surely earned. There was, it seemed, nowhere in the country that he couldn’t have seen on this journey. Were there any villages left to explore? Any hamlets? Any rural roads he hadn’t yet taken? And if there weren’t, why didn’t he come home already? It was June, the dry season, a healthy time to be in the mountains. On the coast, the cold had begun in earnest. The heavy sea air clung to the shoreline, enveloped the city. She prayed that her son was enjoying himself, that he’d learned what he needed to learn on this trip, grown in the ways that he’d expected, and in others that would surprise him. She hoped most of all that he would come home soon, though she wrestled with this notion, and wondered if it was selfishness, if a better mother wouldn’t prefer that her son wander and live every adventure he desired. Mónica imagined young village girls falling in love with her son; she found it easiest of all to picture this, since she was in love with him too: with his bright brown eyes and crooked smile, with his curls and the way the edges of his mouth dropped into a frown when he was deep in thought. He looked like a young Sebastián; everyone remarked on the resemblance. She hoped he was careful, at least, if there happened to be an affair in the offing, and that no hearts were broken unnecessarily along the way—especially not Nelson’s. In truth, his was the only heart she cared about. Never mind the girls.

  In the city, her days went on without him; not in a blur, but yes, actually, in something of a blur. There was little to distinguish one from the next. Mónica hoped for news, but didn’t expect any. She fell asleep every night, certain that there was no greater torture than an empty house, than this empty house. When she told me this, she gestured with a delicately waving hand, palm up, pointing to the lifeless rooms that surrounded her. I asked if all her careful imagining had been useful at all; if, in all that conjuring, she’d managed to have a sense of what Nelson was going through. Not the details—she couldn’t have had an idea of the details—but a sense.

  She thought about it. I think she wanted to say that she had, but found it dishonest, given what came after. That mother’s intuition—she was forced to admit that perhaps it had failed her.

  “Maybe I didn’t want to think of him in any real trouble.”

  “It wasn’t trouble,” I said. “Not exactly.”

  She shook her head. “But it was close enough.”

  CERTAINLY THERE WAS NO ONE who missed Nelson more intensely than Mónica. Other people in his circle admitted that his absence in those months was noted, but not often. He was missed—but only in the most abstract sort of way. It was as if in the process of becoming Rogelio, he’d completed some mystical erasure: Nelson almost ceased to exist, temporarily, though it would eventually be seen as a prelude to a more serious kind of erasure. Again and again, I heard versions of the same sentiment: Nelson was well liked, but hard to know. The role they’d all wanted, to form part of Diciembre’s historic reunion tour, had gone to him, their talented, arrogant friend; and now he was off in the provinces, becoming a new, if not improved, version of himself. There was a hint of jealousy to all this, but little curiosity about the specifics of the tour; and in truth, what curiosity there might have been was soon eclipsed by the news of Ixta’s pregnancy. The world over, people are the same. They love to gossip. They love scandal. People asked the usual questions: If Nelson knew, if he was heartbroken, if he was the father, the jilted ex-boyfriend, or both. If he had regrets. If it was true love, or just sex. Any hint of squalor made ears perk up—it was what they lived for. Old girlfriends offered theories and shared indiscreet stories. Those who’d been friends of the erstwhile couple chose sides; and most, it should be said, chose the proud but ultimately likable Ixta over the absent Nelson. No one knew for certain that Ixta and Nelson had been sleeping together until just before he left—their discretion had been absolute—but taken as a group, the students and alumni of the Conservatory were a rather promiscuous bunch, so many suspected it. The conversation among this particular generation of Conservatory alumni played out along the sordid lines of a television talk show, the kind where couples proudly displayed their dysfunction in front of enthusiastic audiences who pretended to disapprove. More than a few of Nelson and Ixta’s friends had played roles on those shows, as drug dealers or teenage mothers, as no-good boyfriends or lying girlfriends, so they understood the tropes well. Betrayal and infidelity had been normalized long ago. They were actors, after all.

  One friend of Nelson’s that I spoke to, Elías, was almost sheepish about the way they’d all forgotten their old classmate. We met in a creole restaurant not far from the Conservatory, on a warm afternoon in late January 2002. The tile floors were sticky and we tried three different tables before we found one that didn’t wobble. Nelson’s friend smoked one filterless cigarette after another, a compulsion which seemed to bring him no pleasure at all, but which I finally understood when I noticed that he was studying himself in the mirrored walls of the restaurant, as if critiquing his performance. He caught me watching him—our eyes locked momentarily in the mirror—and blushed.

  “I’ve been thinking of quitting,” he said, raising the cigarette above his head.

  I nodded, not out of solidarity or comprehension, but out of sheer politeness. Pity. It was clear he was a terrible actor, or perhaps he was simply suffering a bout of low confidence. In any case, he didn’t want to say anything bad about Nelson, so he shared a few memories instead, funny anecdotes about their time studying together, the mediocre scripts they’d endured, the dreams they’d had, whic
h neither, he guessed, would ever achieve. Elías was working at his father’s advertising agency now, making photocopies, fetching coffee, receiving far-too-generous pay for such simple and mindless work. He resented this bit of good fortune; told me it was, in fact, debilitating to his art (he blew a plume of smoke in the direction of the mirror as if to underline the point) and that he was all but torturing his old man, doing everything he could to get fired.

  “If it’s so bad,” I asked, “why don’t you just quit?”

  The would-be actor stared at me. His expression told me I hadn’t understood a single thing he’d said. He began to answer, but instead picked a bit of tobacco off his tongue. It was a practiced gesture of disdain, which he pulled off fairly well. Then he asked me how I knew Nelson.

  “I’m a friend of the family,” I said, which was, by that point, true.

  “Sure,” he said.

  I brought us back to the subject: Elías carefully blamed the generalized indifference toward Nelson’s disappearance on the actor himself. You reap what you sow, after all.

  “He’d always cultivated this air of superiority, this sense of not belonging, of standing apart.”

  “I’ve heard that,” I said. “But you were still friends?”

  Elías said they were, in a manner of speaking. “But the longer he was gone, the farther away he began to feel. No one said anything at first. But it wasn’t as if he called us. It wasn’t as if he made any effort to reach out to us, to stay connected. He disappeared. Just like he’d always said he would. He’d always pretended not to be one of us. I guess we began to assume it was true.”

  18

  BACK IN T—, in his free moments, Nelson was asking himself similar questions. And there were many free moments, plenty of time for a young man of Nelson’s character to ask himself all sorts of uncomfortable things. About his past, his mistakes—many of which he cherished—and his future, which he found unsettling. With each passing day, he was more anxious to leave. He said as much to Ixta by phone.