At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  On some days, she even permitted herself to complain about the father of her child, whom the filmmaker would never meet.

  As it happened, Nelson’s arrival in the city coincided with a terrible realization for Ixta: that she and Mindo were not meant to be together. She’d known it since the previous spring, but now things were approaching a boiling point. Or not—the metaphor was perfectly imprecise: it was the lack of heat she feared, the lack of heat that made her tremble. She imagined the barren months to come, then the years, the decades, and felt something approximating terror. She and Mindo didn’t fight; that would have required some essential spark they’d already lost. They floated in parallel spaces, all their conversations reduced to the necessary minimum, stripped of whimsy or invention or humor. They talked about the baby as if preparing for an exam, and though they paid the rent together, that did not make their apartment a home. She bored him; and the feeling was mutual. He’d gone too long without touching her, and she could think of nothing worse. Sometimes in the shower she found herself weeping. At moments like these, Ixta placed a hand on her beautiful, swollen belly to remind herself she was not alone in this world. Not entirely, at least.

  That morning when Nelson appeared at the office door, this is where Ixta’s left hand went instinctively. And that’s where she kept it, for a long moment, taking in the sight of her former lover, her former partner, her friend. He’d told her by phone to wait for her, and now, days later, he was here. His very presence took her breath away. He looked young, younger than she remembered him, and this fascinated her: Who lives through a tour like that and comes out looking younger? He’d shaved that morning in the backstage bathroom of the Olympic, and had that fresh, scoured look of a recent graduate prepping for a job interview (though Nelson had never gone on one of those). He offered her a tentative smile. She nodded back. There was nothing she wanted to say, she told me later. She didn’t stand to greet him. She waited for him to make the first move.

  Meanwhile, her employer was in the kitchenette, preparing coffee, carrying on his part of a one-sided conversation with Ixta. (No one remembers the topic.) Twice Nelson began to say something to the woman he loved, only to be interrupted by this oblivious voice from the other room. When it happened a third time, both he and Ixta laughed. His laughter was tinged with nervousness; hers was involuntary, and it was the sound of this combined laughter that made the filmmaker step out into the hallway to see that his lovely, pregnant, and much desired assistant was not alone.

  “I assumed at first that he was the father of the child,” the filmmaker told me later. “The painter. From the pictures I’d seen, they looked similar, I suppose. The same kind of person. I was nice enough. Polite, at least. Did she say anything? He seemed callow, insubstantial, but that’s probably not very charitable. It’s a pity what happened. I haven’t spoken to her since that day, you know? She never even came to pick up her last check.”

  Nelson introduced himself (“My friend,” Ixta added solemnly), hands were shaken, and the first awkward moments the two former lovers spent together were in the company of this filmmaker, who attempted to mask his jealousy with a too-strong dose of bonhomie.

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  “He’s not the father,” Ixta clarified.

  “Thank you,” Nelson added.

  The filmmaker blushed. Then he clapped Nelson on the back, asked a few impertinent, vaguely sexual questions, filling the room with his grand and exaggerated laughter. Then he disappeared to his office, where he shut the door softly, and fired off a few strongly worded memos to colleagues. He’d have Ixta type them up later, and hoped she’d read in his tone the depth of feeling he had for her.

  (She would not.)

  The filmmaker’s conversation with Nelson took five minutes, not more, and through it all, Ixta had sat, as still as she could manage, breathing slowly, talking very little, with her left hand resting on her belly. She didn’t hear much of what was said, willfully blurring the words because she knew they had almost nothing to do with her. She wished for silence. Now that she and Nelson were alone, she began to pay attention again. The light in the room was dim, almost cloudy, and Ixta felt for a moment she had to strain to see him, though he was only a few steps away.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you,” she said, which was a lie. In fact, in her bones, she’d been expecting him, only she didn’t know how she would feel when he arrived.

  Nelson proposed they go out somewhere, just as she had assumed he would. Ixta began to protest that she couldn’t, that she had to work, but then she stopped herself. “I realized that would have been cruel. And it wouldn’t have been true. I wanted to see him. I wanted to talk to him. He was right there, right in front of me.”

  She stood for the first time, and noticed Nelson’s eyes opening wide to take in the sight of her. Nelson, admiring her figure. Nelson, accepting and appreciating the possibility she represented. She loved being pregnant for moments like these. Pregnancy is always mythic; it can be medicalized and quantified, carved into trimesters or weeks, but nothing can subvert its essential mystery. Ixta had a strange kind of power over men; and though their desire manifested in different ways now, it was still desire. For a moment, she let herself revel in it.

  “You look very beautiful,” Nelson managed, which was the only sensible thing he could’ve said.

  Ixta nodded regally.

  “Are you sure you can walk?”

  “Of course I can walk,” she said quickly, and Nelson blushed.

  The truth was, she’d been waiting for some last, desperate gesture on Nelson’s part ever since the day of his phone call from the road. “I’ve always had a sense for these kinds of things,” she told me. Life’s big events, those moments of real, even unbearable emotion—if you were paying attention, they tended to announce themselves, as the ocean swells in anticipation of a wave. Ixta’s childhood and adolescence were littered with these instances of premonition: the tearful day her father left the family for good, the day of her first period, the day her cousin Rigoberto was killed in a car accident.

  And when Nelson ended their relationship, in July of the previous year; she’d felt it acutely then. Ixta could have mouthed his words as he uttered them. What he said that day was somehow not surprising to her; in fact, it was the utter predictability of his words she found shocking. She watched him break her heart, marveling at how thoroughly he believed in phrases she knew to be untrue. No, Ixta thought to herself: No, she was not keeping him from his dreams. She was not shutting him out of the world. She was doing none of those things. If they were happening, he was doing them to himself.

  But Ixta didn’t argue with Nelson that day. His complaints were banal and selfish, and she anticipated all of them. He would regret it—she’d known this even then, had known it in her gut—but she felt no pride or comfort in this knowledge. It would not heal her.

  Now they went for a slow walk, heading west into the dull residential sections of the district, where all the houses appeared to be identical, distinguished only by the varying colors of their exterior walls. There are few monuments in the Monument District, and almost nothing to see. An earlier, now ousted and forgotten, government had intended to make the area its showplace, but those plans never came to pass. History intervened. The war happened. The district was colonized, not by museums or libraries or statues as its name implied but by private citizens, a guarded, rather anonymous group of upper middle class who lived quietly and traveled exclusively by car. Ixta and Nelson were the only people on the street. They walked side by side (“but not together,” she pointed out), struggling to have a conversation. Nelson was careful, asking as politely and obliquely as he could about the state of her pregnancy. His voice was low, and at times Ixta had to strain to hear him.

  She remembers being disappointed: This was what he’d come for? To mumble at her?

  They walked for ten minutes, coming to a small, greenish
park with a few concrete benches, and it was here that they decided to sit. The blank gray clouds showed no signs of relenting; not today, perhaps not ever. Nelson would’ve preferred a café or a restaurant, a place where he could have performed any number of chivalric gestures (pulling Ixta’s chair out for her, taking her coat), but it seems they’d walked in the wrong direction, away from everything, and into a warren of residential streets from which there was no visible escape. Perhaps she’d planned it that way. Perhaps she wanted no gestures. I’ve seen the park myself, and it’s true: in winter, it’s desolate and empty and feels not like the city but like an outpost of it. Nelson quietly despaired.

  In the half hour that followed, he and Ixta touched on the following subjects: Ixta’s mother’s health; the latest film offerings; a near stampede at a local soccer stadium the previous Sunday, which Ixta’s younger brother had narrowly survived; the untimely death of a much-loved professor they both knew from the Conservatory; an article which had critiqued—quite harshly—a mutual friend’s latest gallery show, and the content of the paintings themselves (which Nelson hadn’t seen) but which Ixta described “as if a mad Botero had decided to reinterpret the oeuvre of Georgia O’Keeffe.”

  She played that line as if it were hers, and both of them laughed.

  In fact, that observation came from the critique, which, coincidentally, I had written, just before leaving the city for T—.

  While Nelson was waiting for his courage to appear, Ixta observed the man she’d once imagined to be hers, and felt many things—heartache, nostalgia, even pity, but not romantic love; and the desolate streets of the Monument District provided an appropriate backdrop to these realizations. He kept up a nervous, steady stream of questions—about her work, her friends, her family—but for many minutes made no declarative statements and offered no confessions. Then she placed a hand on his shoulder—“To see if he were real,” she explained to me—and Nelson tensed like a child about to receive an injection.

  “I’m sorry,” he said then. It was as if he’d been jolted to life. “I’ve been thinking I should tell you that.”

  He paused, and turned sideways on the bench in order to face her. Ixta kept looking straight ahead.

  “That’s what you’ve been thinking? That you’re sorry?”

  He nodded, a gesture she didn’t see but sensed, the tiniest vibration in the winter air. She’d locked her eyes on the edge of the park, on a wall painted with a once colorful mural, now faded and scissored with cracks. It helped her remain steady, she confessed later, and in the anxious few moments that followed, she studied the turns and pivots of those cracks, as if attempting to memorize them.

  It felt almost cruel to ask, “What is it you’re sorry for?”

  “I should have treated you better.”

  Ixta nodded. “Yes, I think we can agree on that.”

  “That’s the first thing I wanted to say. There’s more.” He took a deep breath, and continued, his voice markedly different now. Strong, clear. “I thought about you every day in T—. Do you understand? I thought about you and me and the baby. I want to be someone you could love again. I’m sorry. I’ve wasted so much time. Do you hear me?”

  She heard him.

  “Look at me,” Nelson said, and she turned to face him. He reached out his hands. “I’m serious.”

  “I know you are,” she answered.

  Years before, a few weeks after they’d first met, Nelson and Ixta had gone south for a few days and camped along the beach. They were part of a large, boisterous group, and brought more alcohol than food. They’d made a bonfire and drank vast quantities. Nelson and Ixta spent the first night in a single sleeping bag that quickly became coated with a fine layer of sand. They hardly slept, but pressed against each other, the coarse sand between them, so that they emerged the next morning red-skinned and bleary-eyed. The day that followed and the next night and the day after—they all blurred, and when the sun rose behind them on the third morning, they watched in wonder as the surface of the ocean slowly distinguished itself from the horizon, like one of those old instant photos developing before their eyes. First, a thin, almost imperceptible line, a dark wall splitting in two; then the texture of the waves appeared, or was hinted at; and then, almost miraculously, there were gulls, floating lazily against a still-dark, purple sky. Finally—and this was most surprising of all, because their infatuation with each other had led them to believe they were alone in the world—they could make out the fishing trawlers bobbing in the distance, like the toys of a child. Nelson hadn’t said it at the time, because then as now he was afraid, but that morning, as dawn became day at the beach, he’d realized that he loved her.

  He told her now. And when she didn’t answer, he asked:

  “Do you remember that beach? Do you remember what it was called?”

  Ixta said she didn’t know.

  “I felt like he was talking about someone else,” she told me. “About things that had never happened to me.”

  Nelson didn’t give up. He described a life, their life. He reminded her how much they’d laughed. “A lifetime of that!” he said, and she almost smiled.

  It didn’t matter where, as long as they were together.

  “I’ll do anything to make you believe in me again.”

  To which she responded simply, “I don’t love you anymore.”

  She was crying because it was mostly true.

  “You don’t stop loving someone like Nelson,” she told me later. “You just give up.”

  Ixta turned now to face him, just in time to see Nelson’s eyes press closed. Neither one of them said anything for a half minute or more.

  “I’m sorry,” Ixta added.

  “That’s all right.” There was something dogged and resolute in Nelson’s voice. He’d steadied himself. You could say he was acting. “There’s time.”

  Ixta shook her head warily. “There is?”

  Jaime had already sent someone after him. Ixta’s heart had already closed to him. Even that morning, on that park bench in the Monument District, Nelson’s bleak future was tumbling toward him.

  Still:

  “There is,” he assured her.

  He walked her back to her office, heart pounding in his chest, looking any and everywhere for a flower to pick for her along the way. There was nothing. He left her with a chaste kiss on the cheek, a whispered good-bye, and headed toward the Olympic, following a version of the route he’d taken that morning. Ixta sat glumly at her desk and did the crossword. Hours passed and the phone didn’t ring. The filmmaker saw her this way, in such a state, and felt pity for her. He decided not to tell her that Mindo had phoned and, seeing her troubled countenance, profoundly regretted what he’d done.

  “If I could take it back, I would,” he said to me later. He’d told Mindo that Ixta had gone out for a walk with a young man named Nelson.

  “Nelson?” Mindo said. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Then the painter hung up.

  “Yes,” the filmmaker told me, “yes, he sounded very angry.”

  As for Nelson, he was in no rush. Midday streets are very different from early-morning streets—different in character, different in sound. There are more people, but they’re less harried somehow; they’re the late risers, the men and women escaping from work, not racing toward it. Nelson didn’t want to think much about what had just happened, what it meant. He paused to read the alarming newspaper headlines at a kiosk on the corner of San José and University, front pages announcing disturbances in mining camps, power outages in the suburbs, and the details of an astonishing daylight bank robbery, among other noteworthy events. Nothing could be as alarming as what Ixta had just told him. His head hurt from the effort of not thinking about it. He waited at bus stops, but let the buses pass; he walked some more, and stood before a half-finished building on Angamos and considered its emerging shape, watching the workers move about the steel beams like dancers, never pausing, and never, ever looking down.

&
nbsp; For this, Nelson admired them. Later that afternoon, he’d tell Patalarga about these agile, fearless men, and wonder aloud how they managed it.

  In the likeliest scenario, Nelson was, by this point, already being followed.

  MÓNICA SPENT THE DAY at home in a state of high anxiety. She waited for her son to appear, and considered the possibility that he might not. She spent an hour dusting every surface of Nelson’s room, hoping that this task might take her mind off things, but when she’d finished, she stood in the doorway, observing her work, unsatisfied. It was awful, Mónica decided, perverse, to have made this space so clean and antiseptic; it no longer looked like her son’s room but more like a stage set. What she wanted was for the bed to be unmade, for Nelson’s things to be scattered about in no particular order. She wanted his chest of drawers open; and his books facedown on the floor, their covers open and spines cracked. She wanted his unfolded clothes draped over the chair in the corner, and a half-empty glass of water leaving a ring on the wooden nightstand. She wanted signs of life.

  Suddenly exhausted, she lay down on Nelson’s bed.

  She woke a few hours later when the phone rang. It was Francisco calling from California, asking about his brother. It seems Astrid had written him an e-mail, detailing (and quite possibly exaggerating) Ramiro’s brief encounter with Nelson. Naturally, Francisco was concerned. He wanted to know what his mother thought. Mónica, still shaking off sleep, heard the worry in her elder son’s voice, surveyed her youngest son’s empty, lifeless room, and felt she had nothing to say. She didn’t know what she thought.