At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  “I asked him how he’d gotten here, and he laughed.”

  “The long way,” he said.

  Once inside the theater, Patalarga dealt with Nelson’s most immediate necessities. He lent him a clean shirt and a sweater, made him something to eat, and set a pot of water to boil. A few minutes later the two of them were sitting in the orchestra, drinking tea, and considering the empty stage where they’d first met, not many months before.

  While Nelson ate, Patalarga did most of the talking. He didn’t mind. He’d felt very alone since the tour’s abrupt end, and the transition home had been more difficult than he’d expected. Turns out he liked being on the road. Turns out his wife Diana didn’t mind spending long days without him. Turns out she’d decided, while he was gone, that she wanted children, after all. This last point was at the center of every disagreement now: if they bickered about the dishes or the laundry or the bills or the car or his family or her job or which movie to see or what to make for dinner, Patalarga understood that they were in fact arguing about this other, more vexing issue. It was exhausting. Her life had become disappointing to her, and by extension, Patalarga had as well. “If you die, I’ll have nothing,” she’d said to him one evening, and he’d made the mistake of responding, “You’ll have the Olympic.” That night, by mutual agreement, he’d left the house and been sleeping at the theater ever since. Six nights now. Patalarga felt ashamed. He missed her. It was only his pride that kept him from going home, something he understood quite clearly. But a man is helpless before his own pride.

  “Didn’t you tell me a child is always good news?” Nelson asked.

  “In the abstract.”

  “You don’t want one?”

  “Where would we put it?” Patalarga said with a shrug.

  Nelson ate his simple snack (a couple of rolls, each adorned with a bit of avocado and a slice of cheese); he sipped his tea and listened to his friend without judgment. Or without the appearance of judgment, which is just as important. Patalarga kept talking, and sometimes Nelson would close his eyes as if in deep concentration. Mostly he was quiet. Thinking. Processing. According to Patalarga, he looked “like a man floating inside a dream.”

  When Nelson had put away the last bite, he stood, left his empty plate balancing on the armrest, and walked toward the stage. Halfway down the aisle, he stopped, with his hands on his hips, gaze shifting stage left, stage right, then back again. This is the image Patalarga remembers most vividly from that day: Nelson, arms akimbo, his thin silhouette framed by the curtains of the dilapidated theater.

  “I asked him what was on my mind, the only question I could think of,” Patalarga told me later.

  Which was this: “Are you in trouble?”

  Nelson’s voice carried well. “Yes. I believe I am.”

  Patalarga joined his friend. They made their way down to the front of the theater, where Nelson climbed to the stage and sat, just as Henry had on that day of the first rehearsal: in precisely the same spot, in fact, with his feet dangling off the edge just as Henry’s had. Nelson, unlike Henry, let them swing, almost playfully, banging the hollow wooden stage a couple of times with the backs of his heels. The sound boomed in the empty theater like a giant bass drum.

  “So what happened?” Patalarga asked.

  Nelson shook his head. “That’s the thing. I don’t really know. The old woman had a fall. That last day, just before I left, she fell and hit her head.”

  “And?”

  Nelson shrugged. “It didn’t seem so serious at first. But then it did. She was sort of coming apart.”

  “And you left?”

  “Yes,” he said, color rushing to his cheeks. “That was a week ago.”

  Now he was in a rush. Every day counted. Ixta was moving on. A week in T— hadn’t seemed bad, twelve days was doable, but the longer it stretched on, the worse it got. He began to describe the endless hours in T—, its dreary routines. There was something essentially sad about the place, he said. The challenge was not the acting; it was staying focused. Fighting boredom. Beating back the melancholy, which was almost chemical. It was floating in the air. In the morning, you could smell it.

  “That’s woodsmoke,” said Patalarga.

  Nelson shook his head. “It was a prison.”

  “Ask Henry what he thinks about that. What about Jaime?”

  “He promised to come back, with my money, but he never did.” Nelson sighed. “How long was I supposed to wait?”

  “And what did you think when he told you all this?” I asked Patalarga.

  This was months later, during our final interview. We sat in the Olympic, which, even in its ruinous condition, maintained a stately beauty; we exchanged stories about Nelson, a young man with whom I’d spent no more than an hour but who had almost come to feel like a version of myself. By that point, no one thought our relationship strange anymore. Not even me.

  “I understood why he’d left, but I imagined my own mother, falling like that. He shouldn’t have left like that, and I told him so. He should’ve waited to see if she was all right.”

  That’s what we all felt in T—. As it happened, I was the one who had to explain what he’d done. First, Noelia and my mother; then everyone wanted to know: What did he say before he boarded the bus? How did he seem? Was he upset, hopeful, angry? After Mrs. Anabel died, the stories began: That he stole from the old woman. That he killed her. That Noelia had fallen in love with him. In the weeks after Nelson’s disappearance, I—of all people!—was asked to confirm or deny these theories. How many times did I say I barely knew him? That I’d just met him? Even Jaime, when he finally arrived in town, dragged me in to bark a few questions at me.

  None of that mattered to Nelson. “I came for Ixta,” he explained to Patalarga that first night in the Olympic. Needless to say, this answer wouldn’t have satisfied anyone back in T—.

  “So what are you going to do?” Patalarga asked.

  He didn’t have a plan, only an urgent feeling in his chest that he could hardly bear. He’d spent days moving away from the town, retracing Diciembre’s haphazard route toward the coast, and his goal the entire time had been to release himself of this pressure in his heart. “I need to see her,” he told Patalarga.

  “What if she doesn’t want to see you?” Patalarga asked. He was thinking of his own wife, darkly.

  Nelson frowned. “But she does.”

  Of Nelson’s week on the road, we do know this: a few days into his journey, he managed to speak with Ixta from a small town called La Merced. It’s even possible (though unconfirmed) that he spent the very last of his money paying for this frustrating, three-minute conversation. She doesn’t recall much about it (“At this point, does it really matter?” she said when I asked her about it), except that Nelson reiterated those things he’d said to her from Segura’s store on his last day in T—. That he was coming to see her. That she should wait for him. Again, that hopeful, anxious tone of voice. Pleading, you could call it. And if Ixta gave him the impression that she wanted to see him, “Well, I didn’t mean to,” she told me. “I shouldn’t have. But he was very persistent. And yes, it was flattering. I was lonely, you understand.”

  “Just knock on her door,” Patalarga said. “Just like that?”

  Nelson nodded.

  Patalarga didn’t disagree; what’s more, he thought it was likely the only way to resolve things. But having heard the story of Nelson’s departure, he had another, slightly different, concern:

  “What if the old woman didn’t make it? How do you think Jaime’s going to react?”

  Nelson was silent.

  “He’ll send someone after you, won’t he?”

  “He has my address. He took my ID. That’s why I’d rather stay here. If that’s okay.”

  That first night they slept on the stage of the Olympic, and so high did the ceiling seem to them, it was as if they were camping beneath a dark and infinite sky. They were safe here, they reasoned. They batted around a few ill-considered
but pleasing metaphors: the theater was an old galleon adrift on the seas, or a cave hidden deep inside the earth, or a bunker housing two old, grizzled warriors, the last of a once great army, now contemplating certain defeat. They laughed a good deal. They solved the conundrum of Patalarga’s faltering marriage. They remembered Henry in tones usually reserved for a man who’d passed. Nelson couldn’t believe that his two friends weren’t talking. He’d thought of them as an indivisible unit.

  Patalarga had too. “He’ll come around,” he said, without really believing it, and Nelson nodded politely.

  They talked for hours. Nelson described the terrible morning of Mrs. Anabel’s fall, which, he argued, was the logical end to his time in T—. He didn’t feel guilty, just relieved to be gone.

  “Another week there and I might have tripped the old lady myself.”

  They both laughed, then fell silent for a spell, until Nelson said, “I never should have gone on tour, you know?”

  “That’s what Henry said on the bus ride back.”

  “If I’d never left the city, I’d be with Ixta now.”

  “I told him that you could never know these things.” Patalarga sighed. “People believe what they want to believe.”

  This is a fact.

  When Patalarga woke up the next day, Nelson was already gone.

  THAT MORNING, in the quiet, empty theater, Patalarga made yet another attempt to reach out to Henry. He told himself then (as he had on every occasion) that he was doing it for his old friend, persisting out of a sense of loyalty, but he later admitted that his motives were more selfish than that. Patalarga wasn’t doing well either. He was only forty, estranged from his wife, sleeping on the stage of an abandoned theater. The starkness of his own situation made it clear that he couldn’t afford to give up on friends like Henry.

  Their handful of conversations in the few weeks since the end of the tour had been short and unsatisfying. This occasion would be no different. The phone rang for what seemed like an endless stretch, and Patalarga simply let it. A minute, and then another. He had no real expectations. When Henry finally answered, his “Hello” was forced, just above a whisper; then he apologized, cleared his throat, and tried again. Better this time. Patalarga laughed to himself. Henry was acting. He wouldn’t answer questions, only complete the declarative sentences that Patalarga began for him:

  “And you’re doing …?”

  “Well.”

  “Staying busy with …?”

  “Work.”

  “Feeling more or less …?”

  “At peace.”

  They spoke in this manner for no longer than three minutes, during which time Patalarga informed Henry of the news that pertained to them both, that Nelson had come home.

  “And this news strikes you as …?”

  “Good,” said Henry.

  Patalarga sighed. “We’re at the Olympic if you want to come see us.”

  Henry said neither yes nor no; and the conversation, as Patalarga recalls, didn’t end so much as slip away: a tiny balloon on a string, sliding through the fingers of a child. In his mind’s eye, Patalarga watched it float up to the sky and vanish. “At a certain point, I realized I wasn’t talking to anyone. I sort of laughed to myself and hung up.”

  And afterward, he sat in the dark theater for a moment, trying to will himself to call his wife, to apologize.

  AS FOR NELSON, he’d woken before dawn, showered, shaved, and left the Olympic full of hope. He’d slept very little, but once on the streets, felt nothing but energy. The morning traffic was just humming to life, the city’s stubborn refusal to capitulate in the face of another dismal winter’s day. And Nelson—he too would not give up. He too would fight. That pressure in his chest, what he’d been feeling for a week or more, was still there; he’d come to think of it as part of him. He walked in the direction of Ixta’s office, and at around seven, not yet halfway there, stepped into a crowded café. He wasn’t hungry; he only wanted to see up close the men and women who had gathered there. They were, to a person, loud, brash, and rude; and it was precisely their rudeness that reminded him of what he’d missed about the city. He loved them, loved the sound of their laughter, the way they heckled one another. They told vulgar jokes while sipping espresso, shook folded newspapers furiously to underline the validity of their complaints. They cursed politicians, mocked celebrities, grumbled about their families. The place was so busy that no one approached to take Nelson’s order, and so he stood in one corner, content to watch the proceedings in silence. When it became too much, he closed his eyes and just smelled the place: the sharp scent of coffee and steamed milk, fresh bread and sausage. He opened his eyes once more and noted the length of the long wooden bar; the shine of the polished metal banister that led to the upstairs dining room; and the oil paintings on the walls, heroic canvasses composed by artists who’d been dead since his father was just a boy in short pants.

  We know Nelson stopped here because it so happened that an uncle of his, Ramiro, married to Mónica’s sister Astrid for two decades, spotted him. He’d been a regular at this particular restaurant since 1984, and by now his morning coffee was the very highlight of his day. He hadn’t seen his nephew in over a year, and the young man was so changed that Ramiro didn’t even recognize him at first. As soon as he did, he made his way over, moved in part by curiosity, in part by familial obligation (Ramiro was nothing if not correct), and gave Nelson an enthusiastic hug. Their brief conversation went as follows:

  UNCLE RAMIRO: Nephew!

  NELSON: …

  UNCLE RAMIRO: What are you doing here? When did you get back?

  NELSON: …

  UNCLE RAMIRO: How was the tour?

  NELSON: …

  And so on, for an interminable few minutes. Nelson answered all questions with a blank stare, except one. Ramiro asked, “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to be a father,” Nelson said.

  Ramiro smiled generously, with a hint of condescension, as if such a thing were inconceivable.

  “That’s wonderful.”

  The conversation was over; Nelson’s steadfast gaze made him nervous.

  An hour later, Ramiro was on the phone, reporting to his wife that Nelson must be on drugs. He omitted any mention of his nephew’s impending paternity, which he’d simply chosen not to believe. Astrid dutifully passed along Ramiro’s message of concern to her sister, who took the news relatively well. She knew her son wasn’t on drugs, but couldn’t help being concerned nonetheless. Why hadn’t he called to tell her he was home? By midmorning, Mónica had all but given up on the workday. She told her colleagues she didn’t feel well, which was true, and went straight home to wait for her son.

  She crossed the city in a cab, thinking of Nelson.

  She paid the driver with two bills from her purse, and forgot the change, thinking of Nelson.

  She unlocked the door to her empty house, thinking of Nelson.

  BY THE TIME Mónica heard from her sister, her son was standing in front of Ixta, in the reception area of a documentary filmmaker’s small but not unpleasant offices, a converted guesthouse attached to his palatial home in the Monument District. Though Ixta doesn’t specifically remember telling Nelson about her job, she assumes she must have. There’s no other way he could’ve found the office, which was hidden on a side street she herself had never heard of until she started working there. This was a new job, just as everything about her life in those days was new: her body, her home, her sense of the future. When I asked Ixta to describe the work, she screwed her face up into a frown.

  “It was paid idleness,” she said. “That’s all.”

  She worked for a man whose vanity and self-image demanded the employment of a secretary. In absolute terms, there was very little to do: the occasional ringing phone to answer, now and then an appointment to jot down. Her employer, the filmmaker, had won an international award eight or nine years prior for a documentary denouncing the coerced sterilization program the gover
nment had run during the war. It was, like many award-winning documentaries, rewarded for its grim and outrageous subject matter, and not for the film itself, which was mediocre. The director could not understand why his career had stalled ever since. His reputation, such as it was, depended on that award, which was fast losing its luster; and as a result, everything this man did (and by extension, everything Ixta did) was designed to stave off his impending and inevitable professional oblivion. There was a problem: No one cared about human rights anymore, not at home or abroad. They cared about growth—hoped for and celebrated in all the newspapers, invoked by zealous bureaucrats in every self-serving television interview. On this matter, the filmmaker was agnostic—he came from money, and couldn’t see the urgency. Like many of his ilk, he sometimes confused poverty (which must be eradicated!) with folklore (which must be preserved!), but it was a genuine confusion, without a hint of ill intention, which only made it more infuriating. He kept a shaggy beard in honor of his lost, rebellious youth, and employed a booming voice whenever he suspected someone might be listening. In the 1980s, he’d moved in the same circles as Henry and Patalarga, though he’d never been close to them, and, when pressed, admitted to me that he’d deliberately stayed away after Henry’s “unfortunate arrest.” He wore colorful woven bracelets around his unnaturally thin wrists, and had, quite predictably, fallen in love with Ixta. She’d come well recommended by a professor at the Conservatory, and now the filmmaker hovered around her desk for hours at a time, making conversation, telling bad jokes, and ensuring that neither of them could have accomplished anything, had there, in fact, been anything to accomplish. She found him charming, even handsome from certain angles, at certain times of the day; and his awkward, boastful flirting was a welcome distraction from her troubles at home, with Mindo, which had unfortunately continued to fester.