At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  That day when Nelson arrived, part of me couldn’t believe I was in T— again. I hadn’t been back in five or six years. Everything was the same, and yet not at all as I remembered, as if every item from my childhood home had been replaced by a smaller, and less impressive, version of itself. My old hiding place, for instance, the tree in the courtyard—from that spot, I’d spent many hours spying on my parents. I saw them argue on occasion, but on one family visit back to T— I also saw them kiss. I must have been eight or nine years old, and no gesture could’ve been more shocking. All displays of affection were scrupulously hidden from us, the children, and to see them touching so unself-consciously had dazzled me. My recollections of that moment are vivid, even filmic, but the tree, I realized now, couldn’t possibly have kept me hidden; it was thin and weak, with narrow knotty branches and a few scraggly leaves, suitable for hiding a cat but not a boy, and I was forced to consider the real possibility that my parents had kissed in the full knowledge that I was watching them.

  This is what I was thinking when Nelson arrived. There was a knock, and my mother called from the kitchen that I should answer it. I went to the door. He was slight, with wavy dark brown hair, a little overgrown, and narrowed eyes that betrayed real worry. He was young, about my age, which might not have been important in any other context, but certainly was in a place like T—. It’s likely that on the day we met, Nelson and I were the only two men in our twenties in the entire town. Eric, the mayor’s deputy, was our closest contemporary, and he was still in high school. So we stared, neither quite believing in the presence of the other. If there was no complicity, there was, at the very least, curiosity.

  But all he said was, “There’s trouble next door.” Then he asked for my mother. Noelia needed her, he said. Without quite understanding, I called for her. Though I offered, he wouldn’t come in; because I had nothing to say, I told him my name. The stranger nodded and introduced himself as Rogelio.

  It was habit, I suppose. I don’t recall if we shook hands.

  “Mrs. Anabel fell and hit her head,” he said to my mother when she came to the door, and a few moments later we’d crossed the street, the three of us, and were standing in the courtyard. This is what I remember: Mrs. Anabel sat on the ground, in the sun, looking very small, very frail. She had let herself sink into Noelia’s arms, and at first, didn’t appear to be in any pain, but such a flurry of words poured out of her—names, half sentences, questions—that it was clear she was not well. Noelia was trying to calm her down, and had cleaned her up as best she could with her shirtsleeve, which was stained pink with blood. There was an alarming bump on the old woman’s forehead, and she kept touching it gingerly, before pulling her hand away.

  “Don’t touch it,” Noelia said again and again. “Leave it alone. You’re going to be fine.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  My mother rushed over, and Noelia’s expression was of relief. I watched my mother in action. She asked Mrs. Anabel to explain what had happened. Then to follow her finger with her eyes. “Can you get up?” my mother asked. “Can you move your toes?”

  Mrs. Anabel never answered any of the questions directly. She followed my mother’s finger as it drifted left, and then she stayed there, holding her gaze on the empty space in front of her.

  I heard my mother sigh.

  Together, my mother and Noelia helped the fragile old woman to her feet. I offered to help, but my mother waved me away. They held her steady. They brushed her off. Mrs. Anabel had a cut on her elbow too, and she held it up for inspection. I watched my mother brush the dirt from the wound, and pick out a few tiny pebbles that had stuck to the broken skin.

  Then they all but carried her to her bedroom.

  Mrs. Anabel wasn’t dying, or at least it didn’t seem that way to me—but she was on the border of something. That sounds inexact, I know, and perhaps it does lack a certain medical precision, but what I mean is that even then, in the first moments after her fall, Mrs. Anabel appeared to be drifting between two states of consciousness. Her voice would accelerate and then fall off, then pick up again; and neither my mother nor Noelia, and least of all Mrs. Anabel herself, could control it. I watched her move across the courtyard, held up by Noelia and my mother, and it seemed almost as if she were floating, her feet barely touching the ground. She kept up a steady stream of words, calling for friends and relatives, calling for Rogelio, for Jaime, for her husband, quite clearly beginning to panic.

  We made eye contact as she passed me. “Where is everyone?” she asked, but I didn’t respond.

  Noelia and my mother took the old woman inside, and Nelson and I pressed in too. After a few moments, my mother announced that she was afraid Mrs. Anabel might have suffered a concussion. We’d have to observe her carefully over the next few hours. The danger was swelling, and since no one had seen her fall, we had no way of knowing how bad it really was.

  I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to hear any of this. Watching her loosed something within me; like I was a young boy, suddenly aware of nakedness, unprepared for it, and ashamed. I shouldn’t be here, I thought, and somehow this emotion felt selfless at the time, though I see now that it was just the opposite. I wasn’t respecting Mrs. Anabel’s privacy; I was protecting myself from something I feared instinctively. This too was clear: the young man standing beside me felt much the same way. Outside, the earth glowed beneath a miraculous Andean sky, but from the corner of her room, the shrinking Mrs. Anabel exuded only darkness. It was like standing at the mouth of a deep cave and being chilled by its cool breath.

  My mother and Mrs. Anabel whispered together for a moment, the old woman shaking her head again and again. Then, in a surprisingly loud voice, she asked for Rogelio. I turned to Nelson (though that was not yet his name to me), who stood with downcast eyes, his fidgeting hands momentarily still, jammed in the pockets of his jeans. He rocked back and forth on his feet, very slowly, and then, without a word, turned and left the room. Even now, this gesture seems very cruel, and I looked to Mrs. Anabel, then to my mother, then to Noelia, who shrugged. There was nothing for me to do there, so I followed him.

  I found Nelson pacing the yard, looking alternately at his feet and then up at the sky. I sat by the wall, relieved to be out of doors, and watched this fitful stranger, whose theatrical display of anxiety relieved me of the necessity of displaying my own. There was something very genuine to it, and at the same time, exaggerated. I asked him what had happened, and Nelson frowned.

  “My name isn’t Rogelio,” he said.

  “So what is it?”

  “Nelson,” he answered, then apologized for having misled me.

  I told him it didn’t matter.

  “You live here?” he asked. “I haven’t seen you.”

  “I’m visiting. My mom lives across the street. But you knew that.”

  “That’s my room,” he said, gesturing with a half-raised arm toward the bedroom where he slept. “I’ve been here three weeks. Almost.” He shook his head then, as if the very thought of these past three weeks made him tense.

  “You’re from the city?” I asked, though I could tell the answer just by looking at him.

  “Yeah.”

  And then, for some reason, I asked him how he liked our town.

  He smiled wanly, then shrugged. “It’s very pretty,” he said, which I would’ve expected him to say. Then he went on: “What I can’t figure out is what people do for fun here.”

  It was an odd remark. As odd and misplaced as my question, perhaps. The wounded Mrs. Anabel was raving just a few steps from us, and suddenly Nelson wore an amused look, as if the idea of fun had only just now occurred to him, as if that were his complaint—the lack of fun—and not the terrible scene unfolding in the other room.

  “That’s what you can’t figure out?”

  He laughed nervously. For this, I liked him. “Among other things.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Nelson shrugged. “You know what? I c
an’t remember.”

  “She’s your grandmother?” I asked.

  I honestly had no idea what their connection might have been.

  He shook his head, but didn’t explain.

  My sense of him, in those first moments we spent together, was of someone who’d lost his way. He was tentative, unsure of himself. He showed not the slightest interest in my presence. I could’ve been anyone. The sun was in my eyes, and when I looked at Nelson now, it was almost as if he were being swallowed by the light.

  “Do your people know you’re here?” I asked.

  “Ixta does,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “My girl.”

  The name stood out. I’d never met anyone by that name. Never even heard that name before, in fact.

  It was then that Noelia ducked her head out of the room where Mrs. Anabel was languishing. She wore a look of worry. “Go to the store,” she said. “Ask Segura for hydrogen peroxide and aspirin and bandages.”

  Nelson nodded, but made no move toward the door.

  “And try Jaime. Segura has the number.” Noelia frowned at me, at my unnecessary presence. We hadn’t even exchanged a greeting. “You go with him.” We were two young men being shooed away from a crisis. Sent on an errand, like children. I was happy to be dismissed.

  Except for the walk to my parents’ house that morning, this outing with Nelson was my first in many years through the streets of T—. I was always misremembering the place. The stunted tree in the courtyard was just one symptom of a broader condition. In my mind, the shuttered church had always been open; the dusty, neglected plaza had always been neat and tidy. It was a town where people did not die so much as disappear very slowly, like a photograph fading over time. And here I was again.

  The bus I’d come in on that morning was still parked in the plaza, preparing to make its return trip to San Jacinto. A few locals hovered around its open door. They loaded the bags, rearranged them, made space, and jammed in some more. Buses like this one were never full. They left half-empty, and picked up passengers along the way, as many as could fit. Nelson glanced in the direction of the bus. I must have said something about T— not being as I remembered it. I’d been having versions of this very ordinary realization all morning.

  “What was it like?” Nelson asked, with something like genuine curiosity.

  “Bigger,” I said, though that word was not exactly correct. I thought back to my childhood, in the shadow of these mountains, beneath this sky, and it was the only word that came to mind.

  “Everyone’s childhood seems bigger from a distance,” Nelson said.

  Segura greeted us both warmly, even me, though he probably hadn’t seen me in years. Nelson was all business: peroxide, aspirin, and bandages. Segura shook his head sadly. “Bandages, I have,” he said. “And the aspirin. How many do you need?”

  Nelson held up an open hand, and Segura uncapped a dusty bottle, and carefully tipped five pills into a small envelope. “Anything else?”

  “I have to make a call.”

  Segura took the phone out from under the counter. Nelson wrote a number down in the storeowner’s red notebook, while the old man spent a long moment and considerable energies untangling the cord. When this task was complete, he bent over the machine and lifted the handset, pressing it carefully to his ear.

  “Good connection today.”

  Nelson nodded. “Clear weather, I suppose.”

  “God bless,” answered Segura. He squinted at the paper, then at the keypad, before pecking deliberately at the numbers, as if selecting which were his favorites.

  And meanwhile, I had time to look around: time enough to see the dust motes floating in a bar of sunlight, to test my weight on different sections of the warped and creaky wooden floor, to notice the empty store shelves, featuring one of each item—a single bar of soap, a single box of pasta, a single bottle of Coca-Cola—as if these artifacts were not to be sold but maintained as visual reminders of a lost way of life.

  “It’s ringing!” announced the old shopkeeper in a bright voice that seemed out of place in his dreary store.

  I stepped outside and sat on the curb, closing my eyes against the early-afternoon sun. I could hear Nelson talking from inside the store, just the rising and falling murmur of his voice, and I made no effort to parse the words themselves. In any case, I didn’t understand much of what was happening, and felt only dimly that it had any connection to me at all. There was a frail and wounded old woman, a neighbor of my parents, that much I knew; and this stranger, whose foreignness in T— made him recognizable. Beyond that, there was nothing, just the ordinary confusion a young man feels when confronted with the place of his birth. My parents were nearing old age, and if they’d come home to be comfortable, part of me knew that they’d also come home to die. Not now, not soon, perhaps, but eventually. Mrs. Anabel’s sallow skin and bloodshot eyes had made that clear to me. The way my mother had rushed to her side only confirmed it. I would have preferred not to think about all this, and so when I felt a pat on the head, I welcomed the interruption. It was Segura, who smiled at me and, not without some effort, lowered himself down to the curb, placing a hand on my shoulder to steady himself through the process. When he was seated and comfortable, he spread his short legs out in front of him, pointing his toes at the sky, and let out a long, satisfied breath. Then he lifted the brim of his cap and let the sun hit his face.

  “I like to give my customers some privacy,” he said with a wink.

  I nodded, not because I agreed, or thought it was funny or even understood, really; I nodded because I’d been trained my entire life to agree with my elders. If I sometimes forgot this when I was in the city, it came back to me instantly in T—.

  The shopkeeper didn’t wait for my answer. “You’re the Solis boy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Here to help your old man with the roof, I guess?”

  I nodded, not at all surprised that he knew my business.

  “You’re a good boy.” He paused. “Rogelio, he’s your friend in there?”

  And again, out of a sense of respect, I agreed. “My neighbor,” I said, noting briefly that the stranger’s name had shifted yet again.

  “He’s always in here, always calling. His brother is going to have a big bill to pay when he comes home.”

  Then Segura clapped his hands together at the prospect, a gesture that was not so much greedy as anxious. That money, that windfall, I quickly realized, had already been spent. Lest I misunderstand, the old man began to explain all the ways business had slowed since I’d last come to visit. I listened respectfully, and when the moment was right, told him that Anabel wasn’t well. The bandages, the aspirin—they were for her.

  “She hasn’t been well for many years.”

  “This is different. She fell.”

  Segura shook his head. “At her age that can be very bad.”

  Just then Nelson stepped out of the shop. He stood in the doorway, squinting against the sun. The shopkeeper and I turned to face him.

  “I couldn’t get through,” he announced.

  Segura eyed him quizzically. “That’s odd.”

  “Happens.”

  “Would you like me to dial again?”

  Nelson shook his head.

  “Just the bandages and the aspirin, then?”

  “Sure,” Nelson said. “Write it down.”

  The movement around the bus had all but subsided now, the last few passengers making their way aboard. A light breeze scattered a few leaves across the plaza, and the driver honked his horn twice to announce his imminent departure. It rang across the town like a shot. A few heads ducked out of windows; a sleeping dog sat up with a start, and stared in the direction of the bus.

  Nelson did as well. His back and shoulders were straight, and from where I sat, he appeared almost statuesque. The bus clicked into gear, and slowly rounded the plaza in our direction. Without a word, Nelson stepped into the street, and blocked
its path. It all happened very slowly. There was something robotic in his movements, as if he were being pulled by some force he could not resist. He held an open palm before him, and the bus slowed to a stop. The door opened. Nelson looked in my direction one last time, then stepped aboard.

  PART FOUR

  20

  A WEEK LATER, on a frigid mid-July afternoon in the city, there was a knocking at the gates of the Olympic. The bell hadn’t worked in nearly a month, and Patalarga was accustomed to long stretches without interruption; so for many minutes, he went on about his business, scarcely noticing the sound at all.

  What was his business?

  Since returning from the tour, it was no longer clear. The scale of the task before him, the restoration of the Olympic, seemed crushing; nor was the theater all that needed restoring. He’d always been prone to bouts of sadness, but the sharpness of this feeling was entirely new.

  When Patalarga finally went to the gate, he found Nelson, shivering. Winter had arrived on the coast with its usual cruelty; the colorless sky, the damp sea air, and it was all reflected in the tightly pressed eyes of the people on the sidewalk, who walked past the two reunited friends as if pushing against an impossible weight. Whatever a welcome feels like, the city streets offered up just the opposite; and Nelson seemed in every way unprepared to be home again. Physically, he was a wreck. He wore the same clothes he’d been wearing the moment he stepped on the bus in T—. And this too was clear: spiritually, he was elsewhere. You could see it in his eyes.

  “He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a month,” Patalarga said. “As if he hadn’t slept since we’d left him.”

  Or perhaps: as if he’d walked from the bus station, halfway across the city. Or even more exactly: as if he’d traveled for a week with only the little money he’d had in his pocket that afternoon in T—; as if he’d survived days and covered many hundreds of kilometers by haggling or begging for rides in small towns across the provinces, journeying in silence, suffering cold and dizziness at high altitudes; as if, in that spell, he’d become accustomed to both external silence and interior turmoil. Fear. As if he’d tired of explaining himself to strangers, and started doing all that he could in those days to become invisible. As if all his money had been spent halfway through the voyage, and since then he’d eaten only what he was proffered by one kind family or another that happened to take pity on him: a can of cashews and a cup of juice one day, half a mango and a Coca-Cola the next. Evidence of those meals could be found on his T-shirt, which he hadn’t had a chance to wash. He wore no jacket, and hadn’t shaved. His hair was overgrown, and more unruly than normal. And even so, there was something manic in his exhaustion, something Patalarga recognized immediately: Nelson wasn’t happy, or free from worry, or even optimistic—but he seemed liberated.