At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  Henry sighed. “So this bad guy, this villain. Are we afraid of him?”

  He asked in a tone very specific to the world they inhabited: it was the way an actor inquired about his character.

  Patalarga nodded. “We are.”

  “No,” Nelson said, suddenly buoyant. “We aren’t.”

  Patalarga laughed, but qualified his friend’s denial. “We aren’t terrified. We’re concerned.”

  “Nelson smiled in a way that put me at ease,” Henry told me. “And understand that I had no context for any of this. If he was calm, why shouldn’t I be?”

  If it wasn’t quite old times, it was a passable facsimile. They abandoned the work and moved into the theater itself, spreading out on the stage where Nelson and Patalarga had slept the night before. They laughed a little, and filled each other in on recent developments. Henry was appalled to learn that Patalarga was having trouble with Diana, and urged him to reconcile. There was a surprising insistence to his tone.

  “Immediately,” he said. “Right away.”

  Nelson agreed, and Patalarga could hardly argue. They were right, but this sort of thing was easy to say, and not so easy to do. He played along, even stood up and took out his phone. “You know what?” he said. “You’re right, and I’m going to call her.” His friends applauded.

  He went backstage (“for some privacy”), and there, among the variegated junk that crowded the hallways and dressing rooms, he once more lost his nerve. He held the phone in his hands, could hear Diana’s sweet voice in his head, but the in-between steps seemed impossible.

  “I wanted to call,” he told me later. “I just couldn’t.”

  So he waited a moment beneath the single fluorescent light that illuminated the hallway, breathing the stale air. Fifty years of theater. Longer. When enough time had passed, he returned to his friends, to the stage, and announced: “She still loves me!”

  He had a bottle of rum handy, and brought it out now. “To celebrate,” he said. It was all made up (“And they knew it, I assume”), but he did feel like celebrating. “It made me happy to see Nelson and Henry again, to be together, even if it was just one night.” They drank and laughed some more, and at a certain point, they reenacted a scene from the play, rewriting it on the fly to suit their mood and their circumstances. Patalarga’s servant had been kicked out of the house by his wife; Nelson’s Alejo had murdered an old woman in the provinces; Henry’s idiot president was losing his mind to loneliness. This improvised scene was so satisfying and felt so real that it was a surprise to look out on the empty theater and realize they were alone.

  Only they weren’t.

  It was past midnight then, and Mindo was at the gate, calling Nelson’s name.

  THROUGHOUT THAT AFTERNOON and into the evening, Mónica looked for her son without success. She didn’t know where to begin, and the process made her aware of just how little she knew about his life, or at least about his life now. Nelson’s friends, the ones she remembered, were from middle and high school. They appeared in her mind’s eye, effortlessly, a row of adolescent boys standing on a sidewalk in their gray and white school uniforms, performing a world-weariness they could scarcely have understood. She smiled at the memory, could see their dark eyes, their slumped shoulders, their vanity beginning to manifest itself in surprising ways (the carefully maintained shadow of a mustache, or the sneakers whose wear and tear was as curated as any gallery exhibit). Fifteen, sixteen, almost men but not quite—this was not the age she most loved, but it was the one she recalled most clearly, in part because she’d had Sebastián by her side to help record it. Those were the years they talked most of all; the happiest years of their marriage: they were alone in the house with a somber teenage madman whom they loved, two hostages who admired and feared for their captor. They discussed Nelson’s moods the way farmers analyze the weather, looking for some logic in it, some reason. They worried over his choice of friends, worried most of all because it was something they could not control: Santiago, Marco, Diego, Sandro, Fausto, Luis. She remembered their faces, but not their surnames. They were good kids, but not good enough, boys with easily identifiable weaknesses, talents they hadn’t yet discovered; and more worrying than their lack of maturity was their lack of curiosity. On this count, Mónica and Sebastián saw a clear difference between their son and the others. The boys came to the house, and spent hours in a locked bedroom. She could not, at the time, conceive of what made these children laugh. The years passed, she and Sebastián watched them grow; and then Nelson entered the Conservatory, and these boys simply faded from view, to be replaced by others. These others—now that she needed them, Mónica realized she had only the vaguest idea who they were. She looked among her papers and found programs to various plays Nelson had been in. She scanned the names of the cast members, and not one of them jogged anything in her memory. She searched for Ixta’s number, and couldn’t find it. She even called the Conservatory, and spoke to a secretary, but found it impossible to explain what she wanted: for this woman, this stranger, to tell her who her son’s friends were.

  After dinner, Mónica decided to go see her sister, who lived only ten blocks away. She went by car for it was dark out, and one never knew. She found the family—Astrid, Ramiro, and their two teenage daughters, Ashley and Miriam—gathered in front of the television, as if for warmth, a portrait of togetherness that made Mónica long for another kind of life. Perhaps if I’d had girls, she thought idly. For her extended family, she offered a broad smile, and they made room for her on the couch. Not long after, Mónica was breathing at their rhythm, laughing when they laughed. Soon, she’d almost forgotten why she’d come at all, and looked down to discover, with some surprise, that her shoes had slipped off her feet. She wiggled her toes in her socks, a childish gesture that made her smile. She was comfortable, and hadn’t even noticed.

  When the program ended, the adults left the television to the girls. Ramiro disappeared into the garden for a cigarette, while Astrid and Mónica prepared the hot water, set the table, brought out fruit and cheese and olives and bread. Mónica liked the routine, and looked forward to not eating alone. A year after Sebastián died, Astrid had suggested that she move in, but at the time Mónica had been offended by the proposal, so offended it had never been mentioned again. And still, ever since, the house looked very different to Mónica. Whenever she visited, she imagined herself living there, growing old there, and to her surprise, the notion didn’t bother her as much as it had then. Years later, it had begun to make sense, more so now that Nelson was gone.

  When we spoke in early 2002, she was still mulling it over. “I believe less and less in autonomy,” she told me. “I don’t know what it means anymore, at my age. I can only tell you it seems less desirable each day.”

  Ramiro returned, tea was served, and he recounted for his sister-in-law all the relevant details from that morning’s conversation with Nelson, including his odd comment about becoming a father. Astrid and Ramiro found it troubling; Mónica did not, and she couldn’t say why. She puzzled over it. Part of her hoped it was true. It would be nice to have a grandchild, even if she had to travel to the provinces to visit.

  Mónica’s questions were basic: Was her son skinny? Did he look healthy? How was he dressed? Did he appear unhappy?

  With each query, Ramiro became more and more uncomfortable. He had excuses, and he employed them: he’d been rushed, he’d been caught off guard and hadn’t paid attention to the details. Mónica continued to press him, and finally, Ramiro raised his hands in exasperation.

  “Do you want to know the truth?” he asked Mónica.

  She stared at him intently. It was a ridiculous thing to ask.

  “I’ve never understood your son.” Ramiro paused, and took a sip from his teacup. “I’ve always found him to be … inscrutable.”

  Mónica slumped back in her seat. As if on cue, her nieces laughed along with the television, along with each other; two lovely, well-adjusted girls whom this mediocre man had
no trouble understanding. She glared at her sister’s husband. He responded with an insipid smile.

  “Well,” she said, and for a long moment this was all she could manage. “That’s not very helpful.”

  Astrid reached a hand across the table. “What he means is—”

  “Your boy is complicated, that’s all,” Ramiro said. “And no, he did not seem well. He hasn’t seemed well to me in years. Not since …”

  He paused here, and now they all fell silent, for he had gone too far. Sebastián’s absence shifted the air in the room.

  “I’m sorry,” Ramiro said, but it was too late. Mónica had already closed her eyes, which had begun to tear. She went home soon after, and hardly slept all night, wondering if what her brother-in-law had said was true.

  THE FACTORS THAT LED Mindo to the theater that night are plain enough—jealousy, a general frustration with his circumstances, compounded by an afternoon and evening of heavy drinking. What’s just as clear is that they needn’t have. Any number of small shifts might have led him away from danger, instead of toward it. He might have answered one of Ixta’s half dozen calls to his cell phone, for example, rushed home, and made peace with her. He might have run into a friend, who would’ve helped steer him back to his apartment. He was, according to the accounts of the waiters who served him, so staggeringly drunk that it’s a small miracle he was even able to find the Olympic in the dim labyrinthine streets of the Old City. But he did find it. And when he arrived, he fulfilled the role the script required of him: he pounded his fist on the gate, he shouted for the man he now realized was his rival.

  “We heard him yelling, and we were scared,” Patalarga later admitted. “Concerned. It was a howl, almost like something from a horror film.”

  They froze, fell silent, and let the sound of that distant, haunting voice float through the theater.

  They put down their props, and sat on the stage. Perhaps, the three of them thought, he would simply tire and leave, but many minutes passed, and the voice showed no signs of flagging.

  “Open the door!” Mindo called, the vowels stretched long. “Open up!”

  Henry described it to me as eerie: the lonely, pained, singsong voice of a jealous man, now weary, now menacing, filling the old theater like a dirge. “It was nice, in a way,” he said. “I think that’s what I remember most about it. How disconcertingly beautiful it sounded.”

  Meanwhile, Nelson wore a look of deep concentration. Finally he said, “I know that voice.”

  “We assumed,” Patalarga told me, “that he meant that he knew the voice from back in the mountains. I asked him who it was, and he shook his head.”

  “I’ve heard it before, that’s all.”

  Then Nelson stood.

  “Where are you going?” Patalarga asked.

  “To see who it is.”

  Patalarga was horrified, but it was exactly as Ixta said: Nelson never listened. He strode through the theater, through the lobby, and out to the gate, his two concerned, disbelieving friends trailing behind him. He was still safe, on his own side of the metal barrier that separated the Olympic from the street, when he called out, “Who is it?”

  “I know that voice,” Nelson said again, in a whisper this time.

  Much later, Ixta would run down for me the very limited contact the two men in her life had chanced to have. There was the time Mindo picked up her cell phone when she was in the shower. They spoke for a few minutes, Nelson pretending to be a cousin who was in town visiting from the United States.

  “A bad lie,” Ixta told me darkly. “A very bad and unnecessary lie. Ninety-nine out of one hundred people would have simply hung up. But he was an actor, and he told me it would’ve been unsporting.”

  Unsporting or not, it would have been wiser. The only stroke of good fortune was that Nelson had called from a pay phone. For a few days afterward, Mindo asked again and again about this phantom cousin.

  When will we meet him?

  What does he do?

  How exactly is he related?

  Mindo asked with such persistence that Ixta was inevitably drawn into the lie.

  “And in spite of what you might think,” she said to me, “I hated doing that to Mindo.”

  They each knew about the other, perhaps more than they would’ve cared to know. Nelson had asked around about Mindo, taking some care to steer clear of him. On several occasions, Mindo quizzed Ixta about Nelson, all the while feigning a lack of interest.

  The two men had acquaintances, but not friends, in common, so perhaps it was inevitable that they’d cross paths eventually. One afternoon, in November of the previous year, not long after Nelson and Ixta’s affair got under way, Nelson ran into the couple at a bar in La Julieta. If it was awkward, it was also mercifully brief—a grimaced exchange of pleasantries, a handshake, and little else. Ixta watched, her heart racing, as her two lovers shared a few words. She laughed now and again to paper over prickly silences, and breathed a heavy sigh when Nelson excused himself. Later that evening, when she and Mindo were alone, he confessed that he’d recognized Nelson immediately, not because they’d ever met before, but because he’d opened Ixta’s old photo albums one day while she was at work, just to have a look.

  “Why would you do that?” she asked.

  “They were poking out of a box. I got curious. And also, because I barely know you.”

  His tone, Ixta reported to me, was neither accusatory nor grim, only resigned. Then he smiled, as if he were afraid he’d said something wrong. He hadn’t. They’d rushed into it. Ixta was, by then, moved in; and yet their life was under construction. In some ways, it never really got much farther.

  That night at the Olympic, the three members of Diciembre stood on the safe side of the metal barrier, listening. The closer you got to the sound of Mindo’s voice, the less frightening it was. Still, both Henry and Patalarga were surprised when Nelson announced that he was letting the man in.

  “What if he has a weapon?” Patalarga remembers asking.

  “He doesn’t,” Nelson answered. His eyes were bright, as if he’d just solved a puzzle. “It’s Ixta’s boyfriend.”

  And he opened the gate. Just like that.

  Months later, when Patalarga described this moment to me, he was still shaking his head. There was very little time to prepare. “I imagined a raging jealous lunatic. I imagined an animal.”

  Instead they got Mindo. Asked to describe him, both Henry and Patalarga began with the same word: “drunk.” The toxicology report concurs. This should not necessarily imply that Mindo was a drinker; in fact, by all accounts he drank only occasionally. But given the circumstances, one understands why he was in that state. “It must have been a terrible shock,” Ixta told me. “He must have thought something was happening between me and Nelson.”

  I pressed her on this—I mean, something was happening, something had been happening, right?

  She blushed. “You know what I mean. I’d turned him down.”

  “And you meant it?”

  She frowned.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. “What do you want?”

  What Ixta did confirm was that Mindo had a remarkable tolerance, and could keep himself upright long past the point when lesser men would have succumbed. One imagines an alternative version of this evening, in which Mindo passes out at the bar, his drawings of clenched fists scattered beside him, and is woken a few hours before dawn, heartsick, disappointed, but alive. He would have no such luck. As it happened, Mindo appeared before the suddenly open gate of the Olympic with drunkenness painted on him like a carnival mask. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and his features had a blurred, unsettled quality. His eyes sagged, his lips drooped. His olive green jacket appeared ready to slip off his shoulder at any moment. He glanced left and right, and then down at his feet, as if to confirm that he was actually standing there, at the rusted gate of the Olympic.

  Night had brought with it a blanket of wet, heavy fog, and the streetlights above flowered in
hazy yellow bursts.

  “You’re Mindo,” Nelson said.

  They didn’t shake hands, but there was no violence. The threat evaporated the moment they saw each other.

  Patalarga still didn’t know what to make of this. He hadn’t dismissed the idea of a deranged killer coming from T— to snuff out Nelson. He desperately wanted them all to move inside the theater, “where we’d be safer, and dry,” he said, but Mindo was nailed to the ground. He wouldn’t budge.

  “I had the sense that anything could happen,” Patalarga told me later.

  Not anything. This:

  “Come with me,” Mindo says to Nelson. He slurs his words, but there’s no menace in them, just the quiet authority of a jilted man. “We have to talk.”

  “We do,” Nelson says, nodding gravely, like a child who knows he’s done wrong. Mindo never crosses the threshold, and Nelson simply floats out of the gate, as if being pulled by something irresistible, something magnetic.

  That’s all.

  Ixta’s lovers walk off into the dark, lightly drizzling night; Henry and Patalarga stand side by side, like worried parents, watching them go. A half block on, and they’ve disappeared into the murk. Only one of them comes back.

  22

  IXTA SPENT that evening at the apartment, reading old magazines and waiting for Mindo. He had the night off from the restaurant, and she assumed he was at his studio, painting, though it was just as likely he was doing the same as she was—sitting around, reading idly, staving off boredom by daydreaming of a more creative life. If they’d been in a better place, they might have done that sort of thing together. They might have even enjoyed it. She considered surprising him with a visit, but it was cold out, and besides, he might not welcome the interruption.

  She didn’t mind calling though: Ixta tried Mindo’s cell phone several times, beginning just after seven, calling every hour or so until around eleven-thirty. She left no messages, and at about midnight she went to sleep. “I wasn’t worried,” she told me later. “I was annoyed. We usually talked at some point in the day. This was it, you understand? I was bored. I was thinking to myself: what an asshole. I was thinking: this is my life now. I stay at home with the baby, he comes home when he pleases. He makes art. My breasts swell, my nipples turn black. It felt very dark, you see? I wasn’t even thinking about Nelson. He didn’t cross my mind. I’m telling you, just like I told the police.”