This much was true: Nelson was surely home again. In this city, somewhere. Ramiro was an honest man, known to fib about his weight and his income, or perhaps embellish the modest achievements of his children, but in something like this, he would not bend the truth. Nelson was here, in the capital. Surely.
Mónica could think of no good reason why he hadn’t called, and speculating about this matter was, for someone like her, a dangerous game. Members of her generation needed little help conjuring awful scenarios to explain otherwise ordinary situations. It was a skill they’d perfected over the course of a lifetime: reading the newspapers; serving as unwilling participant-observers in a stupid war; voting in one meaningless election after another; watching the currency collapse, stabilize, and collapse again; seeing their contemporaries succumb to stress-induced heart attacks and cancer and depression. It’s a wonder any of them have teeth left. Or hair. Or legs to hold them up. Mónica’s imagination had gone dark, and she could think of only one word: trouble.
“Be calm,” Francisco counseled her from afar. He knew his mother.
“I’m trying,” Mónica whispered into the phone.
The tour she’d imagined didn’t end this way, with her son hiding out in the city, unable or unwilling to come home again. She began to consider the possibility that he’d never left, that it had all been a ruse, that he was living another life, in another district, and had invented the tour as a cover for his planned reinvention.
“Did he say anything to you?” she asked Francisco.
There was silence on the other end.
“When?”
“I don’t know. Whenever you talked to him.”
There was a long silence.
“We haven’t spoken in months,” Francisco said finally. “You know that.”
Sometimes, when she was at her most pessimistic, she wondered if her two boys would ever have reason to speak to each other, after she was gone and buried.
“I’m sorry. What should I do?”
“Find the actors,” Francisco said. “What else?”
THAT’S WHAT MINDO was doing. That afternoon he made appearances at many of the usual places young actors congregate in this city. The bars, the plazas, the playhouses. Mindo paid a visit to the Conservatory, and asked for Nelson there, but no one had seen or heard of him since he’d gone away. The general consensus was, That was ages ago. They were immediatists, like all actors. They barely remembered their classmate, their friend. Everyone seemed surprised by the news that Nelson had returned, and Mindo’s frustration only grew.
We can suppose he was driven by jealousy, and suppose too that his own jealousy caught him unawares. He found the emotion unsettling, just as he’d found it unsettling to wake each of the previous five mornings on the couch in the living room of the apartment which had been, until not so long ago, his and his alone. From what I’ve been able to piece together, Ixta’s reading of the state of the relationship was essentially accurate: she and Mindo were two perfectly nice but thoroughly incompatible young people who’d managed, quite by accident, to bind themselves to each other. The unbinding would have happened one way or another, given time; and even under the best of circumstances, the child they’d made together, Nadia, would have been raised at a certain distance from her father. Many people in their respective circles understood this fact intuitively, and, in all likelihood, had things gone differently, Mindo and Ixta would have both found a way to live with this natural and necessary estrangement, as adults often do.
But that afternoon, after learning that Ixta had been with Nelson, Mindo was furious. He’d never liked the man he’d replaced, never liked the suggestion of him. He didn’t like the look in Ixta’s eyes when Nelson was mentioned, or the way she avoided saying his name when recounting anecdotes that self-evidently starred her former lover. She’d replace “Nelson” with anodyne phrases like “an old friend” or “someone I used to know,” a tic she’d never noticed until Mindo pointed it out to her. If Mindo had any suspicions about Ixta’s liaisons with Nelson, he didn’t bring them up with her. It may have been a matter of pride, or perhaps he preferred not to know. It doesn’t matter: now Mindo only wanted to find his rival.
Instead of Nelson, however, Mindo found Elías, who happened to be at the Conservatory that day, visiting old friends. Mindo knew he and Nelson were close. After the standard and truthful denials (“No, I haven’t seen him. No, I didn’t know he was back”), Elías, a little disconcerted by Mindo’s aggressive posture, suggested he check the old theater, the one at the edge of the Old City.
“Which one?”
Elías was being deliberately vague.
“The Olympic,” he said finally.
He felt as if he’d given up a secret, he told me months later, though in truth, he was only guessing, only thinking aloud.
“The porn spot?” Mindo said, then thanked him gruffly, and left.
“I don’t think we’d ever really talked before,” Elías told me. “I knew who he was, but not much more than that. And of course I never spoke to him again.”
“Did you ask why he was looking for Nelson? Did you wonder?”
Elías folded his hands together primly. “I wondered, yes. But I didn’t ask. He sounded like he was in a rush. He looked upset, and the truth is …” He paused here, as if ashamed to admit this: “I prefer not to speak to people when they’re like that.”
Mindo made his first appearance at the Olympic about a half hour before Nelson arrived there himself. There was knocking, pounding, fruitless bell ringing, shouting. Eventually, Patalarga heard the commotion, and went to the gate.
“I thought he was someone Jaime had sent,” Patalarga told me. “I just assumed that. I mean, who else would it have been?”
There were many plausible tactics available to him. Patalarga chose obfuscation. “Nelson’s not here,” he told the stranger.
“When will he be back?”
“Back?” He was careful to keep the gate closed, and not show his face. “Is he in the city?”
Mindo left without saying another word.
According to Patalarga, that afternoon Nelson was quiet, pensive, and answered every question in a way that seemed deliberately vague. He didn’t say, for example, why he’d left so early, where he’d been, or whom he’d seen; and soon enough Patalarga decided to let it go. The two of them ate an austere lunch, in the best tradition of their tour, and over this meal, Patalarga told Nelson the news: someone had come to the theater looking for him.
“Who?” Nelson asked.
Patalarga didn’t know. He told him about his brief interaction with the stranger, and they could come to only one conclusion: This man must be from T— or San Jacinto.
“Does anyone know you’re here?”
By that time, Mindo was drinking at a bar near the Conservatory, executing fine illustrations of clenched fists in his sketch pad. He would stay in the bar until well past nightfall, after it had swelled with a cast of regulars whom he mostly ignored (while ignoring Ixta’s increasingly urgent phone calls as well) before heading back to the theater just past midnight. He paid his bill but left no gratuity. His sketch pad would be found early that morning, tossed on the sidewalk a few blocks from the Olympic, next to his lifeless body.
21
MRS. ANABEL HAD DIED earlier that week, leaving the town in a state of shock. The funeral was held a few days before Nelson arrived in the city, a beautiful, lugubrious affair, full of black-clad mourners, their faces twisted with sadness. Seeing them was more moving than the ceremony itself, than the death of this woman I barely knew: more than half of the town’s remaining residents gathered in the plaza, the stooped men and wrinkled women of my parents’ generation, the survivors. The principal brought the entire school too, fifty or sixty excitable children with no apparent understanding of what had happened or why they were there. They teased each other, giggling at all the wrong moments. It was refreshing. My father wore his dark suit, my mother her black shawl. A brass ban
d struck up a warbling melody, and then the funeral party marched toward the cemetery, so slowly even Mrs. Anabel could’ve kept up. The people of T— never gathered this way anymore, except to say good-bye to one of their own; the event became something like a reunion. Jaime gave his eulogy at the grave site. “Everything I’ve accomplished is because of her,” he said, and the town nodded respectfully because they knew what that meant. He’d accomplished a lot; he was rich, wasn’t he?
Then the casket was lowered, and we all went home.
I spent the days after with my old man, pulling the rotted clay tiles off the roof. Oddly, the town had felt most alive at the funeral, but now it was as if we were the only people left in all of T—. Our work was done mostly in silence—this had always been my father’s way—but occasionally he’d pause and ask me to tell him again what I was doing back in the city, and what I hoped to do in the future. I liked these moments. It wasn’t a conversation I minded. I didn’t feel put upon, or pressured; I heard no disappointment in his voice, only a genuine curiosity about my life and my plans. The fact that I had no good answers felt less like a stressor and more like an opportunity. Each day, I offered a new hypothetical—going back to school, working in television, starting a restaurant—all fanciful, but not impossible, as if I were performing a kind of optimism I didn’t really have. My father seemed to appreciate it.
One morning, a few days after the funeral, we heard my mother calling up to us from the courtyard. She was with Noelia, and they stood side by side, necks craned in our direction, each with a curved hand shielding their eyes from the sun. Both wore long burgundy skirts and white blouses, with dark shawls draped over their shoulders, and for a moment, I thought they looked almost like sisters.
“Come down,” my mother said. “Noelia wants to speak with you.”
It was a bright, silent day, and the air was still. I love the way the human voice sounds on days like this—clear, warm, like it could carry all the way across a valley. I looked down at my mother, not realizing at first that she meant me, not my father. My old man shrugged, and pulled the brim of his cap down over his eyes. With that, I’d been dismissed.
I climbed down. Noelia smiled politely, not saying much. She kept her eyes narrowed against the sun, and she looked well, all things considered. The loss of her mother, the chaotic days after—she looked recovered, I thought, or perhaps I was only comparing her to my idea of what this kind of suffering should look like, how it would show on her face, in her eyes, in the tilt of her shoulders.
“I have something to show you,” she said.
My mother nodded.
Noelia went on. “Something I want you to see.”
We crossed the street, to her sunlit courtyard, overgrown and wild. The cats slept in the tall grass, and we ignored them, just as they ignored us. Jaime had gone back to San Jacinto, and for the first time in Noelia’s life, the house was all hers. She didn’t like the idea. Not one bit.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She pursed her lips. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Like most grown-ups in my hometown, Noelia was familiar, in a very broad sense; she had a look of stoicism that I associated with every adult from T—. I remembered her, even if I knew almost nothing about her beyond the fact that she lived across the street from the house where I was born.
I lied: “Of course I do.”
“It’s fine. Really.”
“I do.”
“I was there when you were born. I’ve known you since you were a flea.” She smiled now. “And look at you! You’re all grown.”
Noelia asked me to wait while she went to the room where her mother had died. I sat in the courtyard with my back against one of the walls, resting in the shade. It was another perfect day. She came back with the journals. They were handed over with some ceremony, these three ordinary notebooks tied together with a piece of string, covering most of the previous six months. They had no decoration, no stickers or markings on the outside, nothing, in fact, to identify them, beyond the normal wear. Now Noelia untied the string for me, flipped through them idly. The last of them, the most recent, was on top, a quarter of it still empty.
“They’re Rogelio’s.”
“Nelson’s?” I asked.
“If you prefer.”
“What should I do with them?”
“You should take them when you go home, to the city. You can give them back to him.”
It must have been clear by my expression that I was less than eager to take this on.
“But mostly, I think I should get them out of this house.” She leaned in: “My brother wants to find Nelson. He sent someone to the capital to look for him.”
“To look for him? Why?”
She offered me a careful smile. “You don’t know?”
I assured her I didn’t.
“My brother is very proud. He feels disrespected.” Noelia sighed. “It’s best for everyone if we forget all this. My brother especially. So take them. Don’t make too much of it. Just take them.”
She nodded, and I found myself nodding too. I could have said no, I suppose, but no good reason to refuse came to mind; Noelia stood before me, with her simple, pleading smile; I froze. She wanted me to have them.
I took the notebooks, reading relief on her face as she handed them over. I carried them back across the street, where I wrapped them in an old paper bag, and left them untouched at the foot of my bed. My father and I returned to our work, to our panoramic views of T—, the empty town below us, and our steady, plodding conversation about my future.
Eventually I went back to the city, and in truth, I almost left the journals behind. I happened to see them as I was packing, thought back to my conversation with Noelia, and decided to take them along.
Still I didn’t read them. This is the truth: I had no interest. Not for many months, not until I heard what had happened.
HENRY APPEARED at the Olympic just before six in the evening. In truth, he hadn’t intended to come at all, but driving his cab after school he’d chanced to drop off a fare not far from the theater. As he made note of this coincidence, a parking spot opened up before him. He shuddered, then eased the car to the curb, shut off the engine, and sat for a moment. He listened to the news on the radio, waiting for a signal.
See him: his severe expression, his keen sense of victimization. He likely sat for a quarter of an hour, listening for something only he would recognize, wearing what his ex-wife described to me as “his pre-crucifixion face”: furrowed brow, unfocused eyes gazing at the middle distance, pursed lips, and his chin pulled back toward his chest, like a turtle trying but unable to get back in its shell. “A fake stoicism,” she called it, for Henry, in her view, was anything but stoic. “He could play stoic,” she clarified, but that was different. Still, she knew this pose well, for it was this face, she admitted, that had seduced her “back when we were young and beautiful.” She laughed then, not to dismiss what she’d just said, or make light of it, but as if to perform it: in laughter, Henry’s ex-wife was transformed before my eyes and became, in spite of the years, young and indeed very beautiful.
Eventually Henry tired of waiting, got out of the car, and walked toward the theater. He used his keys on the gate, surprised that they still worked, and found his two friends on their knees in the lobby of the Olympic, with hammers in their hands, talking wildly about a man who’d come to the city to murder Nelson. They were pulling up rotten wooden floorboards, a repair Patalarga had been talking about for months.
“It was startling to say the least,” Henry told me later.
The supposed murderer, the one Nelson and Patalarga had conjured out of an initial bout of genuine concern, had been replaced by another, less frightening villain, a blend of various comic-book bad guys and assorted ruffians they’d met on tour. Men with potbellies and bad teeth, men who swore in ornate neologisms and kept shiny rings on every finger. Nelson and Patalarga felt better in the company of these invented scoundrels,
who needless to say had nothing in common with Mindo.
Nelson and Patalarga were laughing, working at a furious pace, and obviously enjoying themselves. Months later, when I first visited the Olympic, I’d come across this very same pile, those slats of rotting wood that Nelson and Patalarga pulled up that day. They were lying in the middle of the space, like kindling for a bonfire. Patalarga and I strolled past them, without comment.
“I had a hard time joining in,” Henry said to me. He asked them to back up and explain, and they did, partially. He gathered the basics: Something had gone very wrong back in T—, and Nelson was in danger. Rogelio’s mother might have died, and though it wasn’t Nelson’s fault, it was possible that Jaime was holding him responsible. He’d escaped.
Henry frowned. “And the girl?”
Nelson shrugged. It was the part of the story he didn’t want to tell. So he didn’t.
“When did you come home?” Henry asked instead.
“Yesterday.”
Henry nodded. “You don’t look well.”
“Neither do you.”
It was true. He’d seemed healthier, more alive on the tour; now Henry’s age showed. These late middle years offended his vanity. He was looking forward to being old, when he would no longer be tormented by memories of youth.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said.
Patalarga offered Henry a hammer, but the playwright demurred. He did so wordlessly, gripping his right shoulder with his left hand and grimacing, as if he were nursing some terrible injury. Patalarga set the hammer down, and the two old friends looked at each other warily. Besides the odd conversation here and there, they hadn’t spoken since Jaime shipped them back to the city. Each of them considered the other to be somehow at fault for this.
At Night We Walk in Circles Page 25