At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  In the entire country there was probably no one who admired Henry’s work as much as Nelson. He might have gone on, but noticed his friends shaking their heads sadly. Nelson stopped, and watched them watching him.

  “Oh, the feeble, colonized mind,” said Henry.

  “We thought you were different,” Patalarga said.

  “More enlightened.”

  “It’s just pitiful.”

  Henry and Patalarga, he would discover, often fell into these rhythms, one of them finishing the other’s thought. Nelson wasn’t the only one who found this tendency off-putting. Now, as Patalarga called for a new and final (or so he promised) pitcher, Henry explained their objection. In their day, there was an illness—“Would you call it that, my dear assistant director?” and Patalarga nodded lugubriously—yes, a syndrome, endemic to his generation. Young people were led to believe that success had to come in the form of approval from abroad. Cultural colonialism—that’s what it was called back then.

  “I thought,” declared Patalarga, “that we had rid ourselves of this.”

  They had drunk a good deal, perhaps too much, or perhaps only too much for Nelson. He didn’t know what to say. He began to explain. His point had simply been that Henry’s work deserved wider recognition; his mind was neither colonized nor feeble. If anything, he was more skeptical of the United States than the rest of his generation. Why wouldn’t he be? His older brother had all but abandoned the family to make his life there.

  Francisco would not have agreed with this point, but let’s limit ourselves, for the moment, to Nelson: he’d been employing his older brother as a straw man for years, to suit whatever narrative purpose his life required at any given moment. A hero, a lifeline, an enemy, or a traitor. Now, when a villain was called for, Francisco once again obliged.

  “Really?” Henry asked.

  “There was a time when I idolized him. When I would have given anything to go. But then … I don’t know what happened.”

  “It passed?” Patalarga said.

  “You outgrew it,” said Henry.

  Nelson nodded. He raised the glass of beer to his lips, as if signaling an end to his confessions. Just like that, he’d updated his story for this new audience, something closer to the truth. His friends from the Conservatory would have been surprised.

  It was early, not yet nine, when they left, but they’d been drinking for what seemed like an eternity. The long summer day slid toward night, the sky shaded pink and red and gold; a sunset made to order, splashed across the horizon. Patalarga sprang for a cab, and the three of them headed south from the Old City. Henry rode up front, declaring it a relief to be in the passenger seat for once. He chatted with the uninterested driver, suggesting a scenic route. “It’ll cost more,” said the driver.

  “What is money? We have to see it all,” Henry answered. “We’re leaving soon, and heading into exile!”

  He shouted this last word, as if it were a destination, not a concept.

  They drove past the National Library, past the diminished edge of downtown, through the scarred and ominous industrial flats, past trails of workers in hard hats trudging the avenue’s gravel-lined shoulder; then along the eastern boundary of Regent Park, where the vendors packed away their wares, bagging up old magazines and books, sweeping away the remains of cut flowers and discarded banana leaves, stacking boxes of stolen electronics into the beds of rusty pickup trucks. Nelson sat by the window and watched his city, as if bidding farewell. It wasn’t an unpleasant drive: at this speed, along these roads, beside these fallen monuments, the capital presented its most attractive face: that of a hardworking, dignified metropolis, settled by outcasts and opportunists; redeemed each day by their cheerless toil and barely sublimated willingness to throw everything away for a moment’s pleasure.

  “Isn’t it lovely?” Henry asked from the front seat.

  Patalarga had fallen asleep; Nelson was lost in thought. The city was lovely. There could be no place in the world to which he belonged so completely.

  That was why he’d always dreamed of leaving, and why he’d always been so afraid to go.

  4

  IN EARLY 1998, Mónica secured funds to pay for a public health theater troupe in the city. She would hire a group of actors to perform plays about unwanted pregnancy, teenage depression, sexual health, et cetera, before audiences of local public school students. Nelson had just finished his third year at the Conservatory, and it briefly occurred to him that he might get a job within this farsighted (and therefore doomed) government program, but Mónica wouldn’t even consider it. “Nepotism is the lowest and least imaginative form of corruption,” she told him, as if her objection were purely a matter of aesthetics. Nelson must have given her an odd look, because she added, rather half-heartedly, “Not that you aren’t qualified.”

  He let the issue drop, and a few weeks later she asked him to help oversee the auditions, as an unpaid adviser. This was how he met Ixta.

  The troupe was to be modeled on a similar program based in Brazil. Each week the Brazilians sent Mónica a package containing proposals, planning documents, full-color graphs charting the rise and fall of the teen suicide rate in the infinite slums of Rio de Janeiro. Except for the reports to European and American donors, which were in English, these materials were all in Portuguese, including the scripts, which would eventually prove to be something of an inconvenience. Mónica’s supervisor—a natural-born bureaucrat, if ever one existed—was ambivalent about the whole enterprise, and for weeks he dithered, neglecting to approve the cost of translation in time for the auditions. He claimed it was a mistake; insults were traded, but in the end, Mónica had no choice but to make the best of it.

  The day of the auditions arrived, muggy and warm, and they gathered in a conference room on the third floor of the Ministry of Health. Because of an architectural defect, the windows would not open, and the temperature in the room rose slowly but relentlessly, so that by lunchtime, both mother and son were sweating profusely. One after another the actors came in, took a look at them, at the script, and then scratched their heads. At first it was all very funny: Mónica apologized; the actors apologized. They squinted at the pages, then read phonetically, and everyone laughed. Some of the actors translated as best they could, Mónica and Nelson listening with some amusement as the Portuguese was rendered haltingly into stiff and lifeless Spanish. If there was any acting happening, it was hard to tell.

  Nelson took notes, but as the heat intensified, as the monologues became increasingly predictable and maudlin, his mind drifted. The soporific heat, the grating sound of broken Portuguese, and these disappointing actors—his friends, many of them—it was all too much. More than a few gave up and walked out. They blamed the heat; they blamed the script; they blamed the Ministry of Health and the entire hapless government.

  Ixta was different. They’d already been at it for three and a half hours when she walked in. She wasn’t pretty but had what one might call “presence”: the set of her jaw, perhaps, or her pale, powdered skin, or the bangs that fell precisely before her eyes, so it was difficult to guess what she was thinking or what she was looking at. And she’d dressed the part, wearing a schoolgirl’s uniform, right down to the white knee-high socks and shapeless gray skirt. With a few quick steps she carved out a space that became hers, transforming the carpet into a stage. She took the pages they’d given her, and flipped through them very quickly, nodding. She handed the pages back to Mónica, and promptly crumpled to the floor. It happened very fast.

  “Is everything all right?” Mónica asked.

  Ixta looked up for a moment, and shook her head. It was a hideous, pitiful face: battered and young and streaked with tears.

  “How can everything be all right?” she muttered. “How can it?”

  Mónica looked on with a raised eyebrow.

  “What happened?” Nelson asked, playing along.

  “The girls at school. You know the ones. They say things.”

  Ixta
sat up, rolled her head around, so that her bangs fell back, and Nelson caught, briefly, a glimpse of her red, swollen eyes. Then she stood slowly, unlocking each of her joints one by one. When she was on her feet, she slouched and crossed her legs, scratching her face and mumbling a few words neither Mónica nor Nelson could make out. Something about the cliques that ran the school and a boy she’d liked.

  “He said he wanted to kiss me,” Ixta whispered, “but then he didn’t.”

  Mónica remembers the audition well: “The girl exuded so much vulnerability it felt indecent just to watch her.” After a while, she asked Ixta to stop. They still had six or seven actors waiting, she explained; and Ixta nodded, as if she understood, then all but ran from the room into the hall. She hadn’t even given them her contact information.

  “Go on,” Mónica said, turning to her son. “Go after her.”

  Nelson found Ixta sitting by the elevators, legs crossed, head drifting into her chest, back against the wall. The rest of the actors eyed her with a mixture of curiosity and dread.

  He knelt beside her. “You all right?”

  Ixta nodded. “It’s hot in there.”

  “You did very well.”

  She bit her lip, looking straight ahead at the elevator door, as if she could see through it, into the shaft and farther, into the metal cage that rumbled invisibly through the old ministry building. “I suppose you’re going to ask me out now.”

  “I was going to ask you for your information, actually,” Nelson said. “For the play. In case we need a callback.”

  “Sure,” she said, unconvinced. “For the play.”

  He gave her a piece of paper, and Ixta wrote down her full name and telephone number. Her letters were rounded and bubbly. It was the handwriting of a teenage girl. She was still in character.

  “Don’t call after ten,” she remembers saying. “My father doesn’t like that.”

  So Nelson called her the very next night, at precisely nine-thirty.

  Their first days were, by all accounts, magical. I find even this simple declarative statement difficult to write without feeling a small pang of jealousy. Friends describe Nelson as smitten, Ixta light as air. That summer and into the fall, neither of them made it anywhere on time, not to work nor to class nor to rehearsal. They were seen at the hothouse parties in the Old City, dancing like lunatics, or at one of the local theaters, registering their distaste by leaving loudly in the middle of the first act (a petulant gesture in the finest spirit of Henry Nuñez). They spent many nights in Nelson’s room, with the door closed, talking and laughing, making love and then talking some more, so perfectly entwined in spirit, mind, and body that Sebastián and Mónica tiptoed around their own house, afraid to disturb the young couple.

  Ixta, Nelson told his father one night, was like a riddle he felt compelled to solve.

  Sebastián nodded. Though the metaphor concerned him, he kept his reservations to himself. Nothing is more deserving of one’s respect, he told Mónica that night, as they lay in bed, than two young people who’ve found each other.

  Nelson was as charming as he was clumsy, and Ixta liked this about him. Sometimes he read her his plays, texts he’d never shared with anyone. They were very good, she tells me, experimental, odd. One piece, a political parody clearly influenced by the work of Henry Nuñez, was set in the stomach of an earthworm: the cabinet of an ungovernable nation convenes to discuss the country’s future, their conversation periodically interrupted by giant waves of dirt and shit passing through the digestive system of their host. First, the bureaucrats’ professionalism fails them, then their courage. The stage fills with shit, and over the course of the play they slide gradually into despair. How exactly something like this might be staged was unclear, and in fact, when Ixta asked, it was obvious that Nelson hadn’t thought too much about it.

  “Isn’t that what producers, directors, and stage managers worry about?” he asked.

  Ixta remembers telling him to do animations instead. She laughed at the memory, because he didn’t appear to understand that she was joking. He just stared at her, confused. “He asked me if I was making fun of him,” she told me. “He couldn’t draw more than stick figures.”

  In any case, Nelson had other plays that were perhaps less challenging logistically: a comedy dramatizing the story of Sancho Panza’s birth, for example. Or a murder mystery set in a futuristic brothel, where male robot-human hybrids paid extra to sleep with that increasingly rare species, the pure human female. He’d intended the piece to be a comment on technology, but also erotic.

  Nelson worked two mornings a week at a copy shop in the Old City, spending his afternoons at the Conservatory. Ixta was three years older, and set to graduate that year. She took every opportunity to make light of his youth. She liked to pretend she was abusing him. He was game. They went to hotels that rented by the hour, places in the seedy backstreets of the Monument District, creating elaborate scenarios drawn from plays they both admired. She was Stella and he was Stanley. She was Desdemona and he was Othello. They pounded these scripts into whatever shape their romance required, laughing all the while. Both found it surprising they’d never crossed paths before, a fact that made their love seem fated.

  Initially, when Ixta and I spoke, she was reticent, loath to recall these early days with Nelson. I can understand, of course.

  “What’s the use?” she said. “It isn’t easy, you know?”

  I could tell by looking at her that she was telling the truth: it wasn’t easy. But I insisted; and once she warmed to the task, the stories flowed. A couple of times she laughed so hard she even asked me to stop the recording. I didn’t, only pretended to. “He was sweet,” Ixta said. “And in the early days, he adored me. I’m not making this up—he told me all the time. I fell for him, completely.”

  “Did you discuss the possibility that he might leave?”

  “Some, but only in the vaguest way. I knew all about the visa. About Francisco. He bragged to others that he was leaving soon, but I never took it very seriously. His papers came not long after we’d started seeing each other, and I didn’t feel threatened. He got really excited, and I did too. We even talked about going together, to New York or Los Angeles, or somewhere. I was working with his mother all this time, you know, and she supported the idea. It was only after Sebastián died that things changed.”

  “Is that when you broke up?”

  “No,” Ixta said. “I’d met him maybe eight months before. And we stayed together for another two years, almost. But yeah, something shifted then. It was the end of our honeymoon. He loved his father. I did too. Sebastián was a wonderful man. Nelson didn’t talk about leaving anymore. And neither did I.”

  She didn’t want to say much about the breakup, so I asked instead about Diciembre. She chortled. “Nelson was obsessed. He loved them, their history, and his admiration for Henry Nuñez was really something. You’ve got to understand, this is not a universally recognized playwright or anything. Diciembre has some cachet at the Conservatory, but really, this was a private obsession. I read some of the old plays, you know. Nelson made me photocopies. He’d be so eager to hear my opinion, it was like he’d written them himself.”

  “And?” I said.

  Ixta smiled politely. “I’ll admit I never understood what the big deal was.”

  HENRY CAME to rehearsal one Thursday afternoon with a stack of his daughter’s drawings, which he dropped in Nelson’s lap, without explanation. He stood, arms akimbo, while Nelson flipped casually through the pictures, not sensing the urgency in his director’s pose. They were drawings of boats and rainbows and horses.

  “Thank you,” Nelson said. “They’re lovely.” Only then did he notice Henry’s expression.

  Because of the slope of the floor, Henry wasn’t much higher than eye level, and the stage behind him seemed immense. They were in the old Olympic, which in just a few weeks had come to feel like a home to them, its unique patterns of decay becoming familiar, even comforting. T
hey were rehearsing every Monday and Wednesday night, Thursday afternoons, and all day Saturday. Sometimes other members of Diciembre came to watch, offer advice, but mostly Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson were alone. Once on tour, they would play in churches, garages, fields, plazas, fairgrounds, and workshops. One show would be performed beneath the blinking fluorescent lights of a nearly frozen municipal auditorium; another on the hosed-down killing floor of a slaughterhouse—but none in a proper theater, if a place like the fire-damaged Olympic could still be called as much. Henry and Patalarga were aware of this. Neither thought to tell Nelson; both assumed he just knew.

  Now, it appeared the playwright had something on his mind.

  “You want me,” Henry said (bellowed, according to Patalarga), “to spend a month or two away from this delicate, budding artist, this daughter I adore, the only person I love in this world, so I can accompany you while you fuck up my play? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Nelson had not, to his knowledge, been saying that. He’d thought things had been going well. He stammered a defense, but Henry cut him off.

  From across the theater, Patalarga watched. He told me later that he’d been expecting a scene like this for at least a few days before it happened. Nelson was not, in Patalarga’s words, “fully submitting to the world of the idiot.” There was only one way to satisfy Henry, and that was total immersion. Patalarga recalled an experimental piece from the early 1980s, a play about an imaginary slum built atop the remains of an indigenous graveyard. It was a dark, caustic three-act piece full of ghosts, and in the lead-up to opening night, Henry had a dozen doll-sized caskets built for his cast. He asked every actor to sleep with one of these tiny coffins beside him in bed, so they might better understand the emotion sustaining the work.