At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  No matter. On a Monday in March 2001, Nelson was summoned to rehearsals at a theater in the Old City, a block off the traffic circle near the National Library, where his father had once worked. After a dismal year—a breakup, a protracted tenure at an uninteresting job, the disappointing aftermath of a graduation both longed for and feared—Nelson was simply delighted by the news. Henry was right: Nelson, almost twenty-three, had a backpack full of scripts, a notebook jammed with handwritten stories, a head of unruly curls, and seemed much, much younger. Perhaps this is why he got the part—his youth. His ignorance. His malleability. His ambition. The tour would begin in a month. And that is when the trouble began.

  2

  NORMALLY, Nelson would have shared news of this sort with Ixta. Now he doubted himself. She’d been his girlfriend until the previous July, and they’d parted ways, not amicably, on a day that Nelson considered to be the dead heart of winter. Ghoulish clouds, a fine, gray mist. It was entirely his doing—he wanted freedom, he said. She scoffed, “What am I, your jailer?” and in response, selfish but authentic tears bubbled in his eyes. He was going to the United States and couldn’t be beholden to her or anyone in pursuit of his future. They didn’t speak for three months, during which time he made no plans and took no steps toward this supposedly brave and life-changing move.

  In early October, Nelson and Ixta met for a coffee, a tense affair which led, nonetheless, to another meeting, a few weeks later. Quite unexpectedly, midway through this second encounter, he found himself laughing. And Ixta laughing too. It wasn’t tentative, or self-conscious, or polite. And this shook him, the realization that, had he more nerve, he could reach across the narrow table that separated them, and—in front of all these strangers—casually lay his hand upon hers. No one would notice or think it odd. They might even smile at the sight, or say to themselves something like:

  Oh, what a handsome young couple!

  He didn’t, of course—not that day—but he did make some progress. Slowly. Patiently. At the steady rate of an ant gathering food, or a bird building a nest. And it paid off: by the start of the Christmas season, they were sleeping together again. It happened almost by accident at first, but the second time filled him with hope. They began meeting every two weeks or so, more if Mindo, Ixta’s new boyfriend, was working nights. These encounters were the source of both happiness and torment for Nelson, but he was, in any case, unable or unwilling to push things any further. In their nakedness, they talked about everything except what they were doing together, the future, and somehow the vagueness of their new relationship was why it felt so very adult. Ixta never asked if he still intended to leave for the United States, nor did he mention it. He would—someday soon, he felt certain—tell her he loved her, that he missed her, that he was sorry for everything, and that they should be together, if not forever, then at least for now. Afterward, things would be clearer. He hadn’t written the scene out—he didn’t do that sort of thing anymore—but he had projected himself into it, rehearsed a speech or two in his head. As it turns out, Ixta was expecting this as well. She didn’t know how she’d respond, but she was waiting. There was only the small issue of his not having said anything.

  In March, when he heard the news about Diciembre, Nelson considered all they’d been through, what surely lay ahead, and decided it was correct to call her first. Her place in line was a nod to their past, to their imagined future. The phone rang twice, a curt hello. Ixta let him talk, and congratulated him, drily. He listened: it was the voice she used when Mindo was in the room.

  Nelson and Ixta were both actors, though, so this fact hardly precluded conversation; in fact, it was more important than ever to behave naturally. Just two friends talking. The subterfuge was part of the attraction, one imagines. Ixta played her part: the news was grand, she told him. “How long will you be gone?”

  “A couple of months, maybe three.”

  There was a certain sadism to his announcement. “I felt abandoned,” Ixta said to me later. “Again.”

  She kept this confession to herself, and instead offered: “You always did want to travel.”

  “It could even go for longer, if we’re well received.”

  “One hopes.”

  Nelson waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. She’d gifted him these two words, but they were impossible to interpret. One hopes for what?

  In the background: “Who’s that, baby?”

  Nelson flinched, but refused to back down. Later, he’d wonder if he’d been reckless. But really: what if they were caught? Shouldn’t he want that to happen?

  “Shall we celebrate?” he asked.

  In his mind, the fact that they were lovers—and only lovers, for now—was a relief to Ixta. He imagined her grateful that he placed no pressure on their future, did not demand a label for this new iteration of their relationship. He imagined her impressed by his maturity, by his willingness to share her with another man. But this formulation was partial. It did not take into account the fact that she’d loved him, or that he’d broken her heart. It did not consider that her heart might be broken still, or that every time they slept together, it broke a little more.

  “I don’t know,” Ixta said. “I’m busy this week.”

  “I thought you’d be happy for me,” Nelson said, and immediately regretted it. He sounded so plaintive, so self-involved. There were certain traits he’d been careful not to manifest since their reconciliation, but here they were, slipping out into the open, naked. He wanted to be a better person; and if that were not possible, at least to seem like one.

  “I am happy for you,” she said. “Thrilled.”

  He doubled down: “I’d like to see you.”

  Ixta sighed: talking to herself now, in a rapid clip that tumbled the conversation to a close. “Sure. Yeah. Okay. Great. Talk soon.” He could almost hear the man lying next to her, eyes half-closed, wrapping Ixta’s brown hair casually around his finger.

  Nelson held the phone a little while longer, for no good reason.

  THE SECOND PERSON to hear the good news was his mother, Mónica, who’d been widowed three years prior, and whose capacity for joy had been greatly diminished ever since. That phrase is hers: “capacity for joy,” she said to me, as one might describe the potential speed of a four-cylinder engine, or the memory inside a new computer. When this was brought to her attention, Mónica laughed. “Too many years as a bureaucrat,” she said. “Imagine the life I could have had!”

  But the truth is she’d liked her life just fine until her husband died. The house she and her younger son shared was strange to them now; and both spent as little time there as possible. The first year, Nelson often heard his mother crying very late at night. Francisco would sometimes call from California, and stay on the phone with her for long spells. The melancholy chatter emerging from the other room lulled him to sleep. He slept quite a bit in those days. Mónica was better now. She still kept her husband’s pajamas under his old pillow, and respected the notion that one side of the bed was his. It was only right she feel her husband’s absence like a wound.

  Mónica went to the movies a great deal, American mostly. She’d developed a taste for action films and thrillers. The more explosions and special effects, the better; if the movie involved aliens or submarines, she privately rejoiced. She even tried to explain this new interest to her sons, separately, with varying results. Predictably, Nelson (for whom the storytelling aesthetic was not a matter of taste but a deeply held conviction) was less than supportive. Francisco, on the other hand, regarded it as comical, and somehow in keeping with his mother’s other eccentricities; she made origami swans from tea bag wrappers, flocks of them appearing in the house’s odd corners: in a little-used kitchen cupboard, behind the fine china; in the dining room, seated at the head of the table; or perched on windowsills, facing the street. She never threw away a magazine without cutting a pretty picture or two out of it first, their refrigerator door becoming the de facto gallery space for these images, a co
llage of faces which had made Nelson and Francisco feel, as children, that they were part of an eclectic and impossibly large family. And since Sebastián had passed, Mónica had picked up one of his old habits: writing letters to the newspapers, for example, complaining about potholes, traffic jams, rising crime, the lack of green space. These she wrote in Sebastián’s name, under his signature, faithful to her husband’s acid and erudite style. Whenever one was published, Mónica felt a pang, a sense of accomplishment, a confirmation of her solitude. She’d save the clippings in a folder, and sometimes read them before bed, as Sebastián had often done when he was alive.

  About the movies, Mónica felt neither of her sons understood. It wasn’t the stories she liked but the atmosphere that came with them. She’d find herself in line in front of the theater, surrounded by mad swarms of teenage boys, behaving as teenage boys do: badly. They were manic, poorly dressed, unnecessarily loud. I accompanied her to one of these films, and saw firsthand her unmistakable joy. The worse the film was, the more mindless, the happier Mónica became: her new peers talked back to the screen and cheered every explosion, creating a cacophony nearly equal to that of the film itself. It was a surprise to her too, she told me, but in their company, she felt peace. Comfort. A reminder that she wasn’t dead yet.

  The night Nelson received the news about Diciembre, it so happened that both mother and son were home at dinnertime and that neither had eaten. He’d intended to mention it in a slapdash, toss-away sort of comment that might require a quick hug and little else, but that’s not how things turned out.

  “Do you remember the audition?” he asked, “from last week?” And without waiting for an answer, he blurted it out: He’d gotten the part. He’d be going on tour.

  Mónica was a small, proud woman; both smaller and prouder, in fact, in the years since Sebastián had died. Now, though she tried to hide it, Mónica began to cry.

  Nelson protested: “Mom.”

  “I’m happy for you,” she said. “That’s wonderful!”

  Her voice cracked. She asked for details, but had to sit to hear them. Her legs felt weak. He told her what he knew: They would leave the capital in April, head up into the mountains. As many shows as they could manage, perhaps six or seven a week. In most every town, they’d begin with a negotiation, for a space, for a time. They had contacts, and Diciembre was respected and fairly well known, even now. If the town was big enough, they’d stay awhile, until everyone had seen them perform. The circuit was sketched out, but subject to improvisation.

  “Of course,” Mónica said.

  He went on. Roughly: San Luis (where one of the traveling members of Diciembre had a cousin), a week and a half in the highlands above and around Corongo (where the same man was born, and where his mother still lived), Canteras (where Henry Nuñez himself had lived from age nine until he ran away to the capital at age fourteen), Concepción, then over the ridge to Belén, and into the valleys below. Posadas, El Arroyo, Surco Chico, up toward San Germán, and then the coast. A dozen smaller villages in between. An undeniably ambitious itinerary. The heart of the heart of the country. It was the tour Diciembre had intended to do, fifteen years earlier, until Henry’s arrest scuttled those plans.

  By this point, Mónica was sobbing.

  “What a beautiful trip,” she said, “just beautiful.” And though she meant these words, perhaps it’s worth noting that she’d never heard of most of the towns her son listed, and could hardly connect an image to their names. She confessed it to me: They weren’t, in her mind, specific places but ideas of places. Notions. Echoes. The fact that one could even go to the interior still amazed her: during the war much of the country had been off-limits, far too dangerous for travel—but now her son would board a night bus and think nothing of it. It was astonishing. In 1971, on their honeymoon, she and Sebastián drove her father’s car out of the city, into the fertile valleys that tilted toward the jungle, to picturesque riverside towns with cobblestone streets and thatched-roof adobe houses. Complex, unpronounceable names, which ten years later, during the war, would be synonymous with fear. But not then. If some of the names had been forgotten, everything else she recalled vividly: the bright, clean water; the thick, humid air; the magical feeling of levity; and this man—her husband—all to herself. Her body ached at the memory.

  “What’s the matter?” Nelson asked, sitting beside his mother as she wept. “It’s only a couple of months.”

  Mónica couldn’t explain, or preferred not to. Where to begin?

  “I haven’t eaten, I’m just a little light-headed,” she said, and tried to remember the last time she’d cried. Like this? Weeks—no, months! Later she told me: “I was frightened. I’d be left alone, completely alone. I was certain I’d lose him. I don’t know how, but I just knew.”

  THE ONE PERSON Nelson didn’t share his good news with was his brother, Francisco. They weren’t talking much in those days. Francisco’s occasional e-mails went unanswered (Nelson didn’t take this form of communication seriously and thought of it as a fad); and whenever he called from the United States, it seemed his younger brother had just stepped out. In all, they spoke perhaps three times a year, never for longer than ten minutes. The crushing, but entirely logical, result of so much distance was this: the less they spoke, the less they had to talk about.

  Nelson’s childhood can be divided roughly into two parts: before Francisco left for the United States and after. Until age thirteen, Nelson lived with Francisco, sharing a room, all manner of confidences, and a certain conspiratorial tension. To be sure, there was a hierarchy: when Francisco bullied Nelson, Nelson admired his brother’s strength; when Francisco made fun of him, Nelson marveled at his brother’s wit; when Francisco tricked him, Nelson appreciated his brother’s cleverness. It would be unfair to say they didn’t get along—though they argued a good deal and even fought on occasion, that’s only part of the story. It’s more accurate to say Nelson looked up to his brother without reservation; that he—like younger brothers throughout the world, since hominids organized into families—was born into a cult. That Francisco was, until he left, and for a good while afterward, the model of everything Nelson wanted to be.

  Mónica and Sebastián moved together to Baltimore in 1972, to study. They’d married the year before, and once in the United States decided it was time to start a family. Sebastián, when he was alive, explained the decision this way: having an American baby was like putting money in the bank. Francisco was born in 1974. Mónica worked toward her public health degree at Johns Hopkins, Sebastián for his master’s in library science. While his parents studied, Francisco observed the interior of their small apartment in the company of a talkative American nanny. So talkative, in fact, that in the interview, Mónica and Sebastián had hardly been able to get a word in. They hoped some of this woman’s English would stay lodged in their son’s brain, where it might be useful later.

  Francisco’s linguistic education was cut short, however, when the government back home was ousted three months before his second birthday. The news was spotty, but Sebastián and Mónica soon gathered a few salient facts. The most important: the new leaders were not on friendly terms with the Americans. The response came soon enough: the family’s visas would not be renewed. Appeals, they were told, could be filed only from the home country. The university hospital wrote a letter on Mónica’s behalf, but this well-meaning document vanished into some bureaucrat’s file cabinet in suburban Virginia, and it soon became clear that there was nothing to be done. Rather than risk the undignified prospect of a deportation (or more unthinkable, staying on, and living in the shadow of legality) Sebastián and Mónica chose to pack their things and go; just like that, their American adventure came to a premature end. Still, the accident of his place of birth gave Francisco an important practical and psychological advantage, something which shaped his personality in the years to come: a U.S. passport, and all that it represented.

  Nelson was born in 1978, when Francisco was four. The
armed conflict began two years later, in a faraway province to the south of the capital, a place so remote the war was almost three years old before anyone took it seriously. Five before many people knew enough to be afraid. By 1986 though, everything was clear enough, even to Sebastián and Mónica’s two young boys. Throughout their childhood, as the war tightened its grip on the city, as the economy began to wobble, Francisco taunted Nelson with his remarkable travel document. It was the equivalent of a magic carpet, the possibility of escape implicit among its powers, somehow always present in conversations between the brothers. It was expected that Francisco would emigrate as soon as was feasible, and bring his younger brother with him at the first opportunity. Francisco finished school, studied for the TOEFL, and as the date of his eventual departure drew near, lorded this good luck over his increasingly frightened younger brother. Nelson did Francisco’s laundry, made his bed, fetched things for him from the store—an endless number of petty errands, all under threat of a withheld visa. “What a shame,” Francisco might say, shaking his head sadly as he observed a messy stack of poorly folded clothes. “I’d hate to have to leave you here.”

  (Remarkably, this scene, recounted to me by a shamefaced Francisco in January 2002, also appears in Nelson’s journals. In that version, Francisco’s quote is slightly, albeit crucially, different: “I’d hate to have to leave you here to die.”)

  Whatever the exact words, regrettable episodes like these were forever imprinted on Nelson’s consciousness, the threat of being left behind reiterated so often and with so many harrowing overtones that it began to sound like a ghost story, or a horror film, in which he, Nelson, was the victim. At the time Francisco had no understanding of what he was putting his brother through. Whatever cruelties he committed in those years were a function of his impatience and immaturity. His ignorance. He was eager for his own life to begin far from the crumbling, violent city where he lived. Though he never admitted it, not to his younger brother or to anyone, Francisco was also afraid: that it was all a dream, that he too would be condemned to stay; that someone at the airport in Miami or New York or Los Angeles would take a look at him, at his passport, and laugh. “Where’d you get this?” they’d ask, chuckling, and he’d be too startled to answer. He knew nothing, after all, about being American. He was hungry for experience of the kind he could only have far from his family and their expectations. Land of the free, etc. In this regard, Francisco was an ordinary boy, with ordinary ambitions.