At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  Rogelio wanted to audition too, but there was a problem.

  “I can’t read,” he confessed to Henry. He was ashamed. “How can I learn the script?”

  At this point in our interview, Henry fell silent once more. He scratched the left side of his head with his right hand, such that his arm reached across his face, hiding his eyes. It was a deliberate and evasive gesture; I was reminded of children who close their eyes when they don’t want anyone to see them. We sat in Henry’s apartment, where he’d lived since separating from Ana’s mother more than four years before. There was a couch, two plastic lawn chairs that looked out of place indoors, and a simple wooden table. One might have thought he’d just moved in.

  “Rogelio was my best friend, you know?”

  “I know,” I said.

  “At a time when I needed a friend more than I ever had before. I loved him.”

  “I know.”

  “And even so—before we went on tour again, just now, I hadn’t thought about him in years. I find this a little shameful, you know? Do you see how awful it is?”

  I nodded for him to go on, but he didn’t. “It’s not your fault,” I said. “You didn’t destroy the prison. You didn’t send the soldiers in.”

  “You’re right,” Henry said.

  “You taught him to read.”

  “But I didn’t save him.”

  “You couldn’t have.”

  “Precisely.”

  We decided to break. It was time. I excused myself, wandered back to the bathroom at the end of the hallway and splashed cold water on my face. When I returned, Henry was standing on the narrow balcony of his apartment, wearing the same look of exhaustion, of worry. In the tiny park in front of his building, some children were drawing on the sidewalk.

  “My daughter draws much better,” he said.

  When we went back inside, I asked him what he’d expected from the tour, what his hopes were. He began to speak, then stopped, pausing to think. “If the text of a play constructs a world,” Henry said finally, “then a tour is a journey into that world. That’s what we were preparing for. That’s what I wanted. To enter the world of the play, and escape my life. I wanted to leave the city and enter a universe where we were all someone different.” He sighed. “I forbade Nelson to call home.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted him to help me build this illusion. I needed his help. This sounds grandiose, and dramatic, I know, but …”

  I told him not to worry about how it sounded. “Did you have any misgivings about it?”

  It was a poorly phrased question. What he’d been trying to tell me was this: his misgivings in those days were all encompassing, generalized, profound. He could push them away for hours at a time, but with only great effort. And they returned. Always.

  “To be quite honest, it wasn’t the tour I was afraid of,” Henry said. “It was everything.”

  AT MY REQUEST, Ana’s mother took a look at the notebook, spending a few moments with the pages, smiling occasionally as her eye alighted on a particular phrase or observation. She read a couple lines aloud, letting out a short, bitter laugh now and then. When she was finished, she shook her head.

  “He gave you these?” Henry’s ex-wife asked, wide-eyed.

  I told her he had.

  “Henry’s the moody type,” she said, “nothing new. An artist. Always was. But he could enter these spirals of unpleasantness, just like what you describe. Only he wouldn’t write it down, not like this. In eight years—was it that long? Jesus—in eight years, I never saw him write down anything that wasn’t for the classes at that school where he taught. Teaches. Whatever. But he’d talk this way sometimes, stream of consciousness, chatter. At night mostly. Imagine living with this!”

  She threw two hands in the air, and the notebook tumbled to the floor.

  “I can’t believe I’m going to tell you this,” she said, “but listen. Toward the end, he was never home, God bless. He’d go to school, and then drive the cab till ten. He’d come home, climb into bed, and say: Baby, I fucked a passenger today, on the way to the airport. Wonderful, I’d say, half-asleep, but you still have to fuck me. I’m your wife. It was a game, see? And at first he would. Four times a week. Then three. Then once. But then, he wouldn’t—sleep with me, I mean. Not at all. He’d sleep beside me, but I’d be awake, waiting. He’d snore, and I’d want to kill him. I’d put my hand on his cock. Nothing. Like touching a corpse. He would talk in his sleep, nonsense like this stuff here.” She picked up the fallen notebook, shaking the pages at me. “And then one day, I realized that it wasn’t just stories, it was true: he actually was fucking his passengers. I said, Henry, I’m leaving. Do you know how he responded? Did he tell you this?”

  I shook my head.

  “He said, ‘Oh, no, the turtle’s getting away! Hurry!’ I thought he was drunk. On drugs. I slapped him. Do you hate me? I asked. I was hurt, you understand. Angry. Do you hate me, I said. Is that it? Do you hate our life? Are you trying to break my heart?”

  “How did he respond?”

  “He collapsed, sobbing, and told me no. That he hated himself, that he had for years.” She laughed drily. “That his unhappiness was a monument! Like a statue in the Old City. One of those nameless heroes covered in bird shit, riding a stone horse. I told him not to try his poetry now. That it was too late. He begged me to stay.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Of course not. I left him, like any reasonable, self-respecting woman would’ve done. He’d slept with half the city, but it wasn’t his fault because he was depressed? If I’d stayed a moment longer, I would’ve put a steak knife through his neck. Or through my own. So I took Ana, and we went to my mother’s house.”

  “Did you ever meet Nelson?”

  As it turns out she had, during the last week of rehearsals before they left the city. One afternoon she dropped their daughter off at the Olympic. (“What a dump, and how sad to see it that way! I don’t know why Patalarga would’ve wasted a cent on that place.”) She got to see some of the play. It was the last week of rehearsals.

  What did she think?

  “About the play, or about Nelson?”

  “Both.”

  She frowned. Nelson admired Henry without reservation—that much was clear to her. She saw about half a rehearsal, enough to get a sense of the dynamic between them: Henry was hard on Nelson. Interrupted him, chastised him, explained a scene, a beat, once and again; and all the while, Nelson listened carefully to everything, suppressing the frustration he surely must have felt. And he was good. Intense. Very professional. You’d think they were preparing to tour the great halls of Europe, and not a bunch of frostbitten Andean villages.

  “And the play?”

  Ana’s mother responded with a question: Did I watch much theater? I told her I did, my fair share.

  “You know what? I’d remembered it being funny. Fifteen years ago, Henry had a sense of humor. I didn’t remember it being so fucking dark. It was always there, in the script, I suppose, but he was emphasizing it now. What can I say? Life does that to a man. Patalarga was trying. He’d add a note of slapstick, but it just wasn’t … I mean, it had its moments. I’ll tell you this much, which I’m not sure Henry even knows. My daughter, Ana—she fell asleep. She’s no critic, but there it is. She slept. Soundly.”

  When our interview was over, Henry’s ex-wife excused herself for having spoken so crudely. “I don’t hate him, I just wouldn’t say Henry brought out the best in me. We’re better off apart.” She paused. “Or at least I am, which really is what matters. To me, I mean.”

  I told her that I appreciated her honesty.

  She asked that her name not be printed. It’s been years, but I’m honoring that request.

  6

  HENRY, PATALARGA, AND NELSON set out on April 16, 2001, on a night bus to the interior. That evening, in the bus station waiting room, the television news reported that a famous Andean folksinger had been killed by her manager. Groups of yo
ung men huddled together, sharing their titillating theories behind the murder, who had slept with whom, how the killer might have succumbed to the terrible logic of jealousy. Entire families sat glumly, staring in shock at the television, as if they’d lost a loved one—and they had, Nelson supposed.

  The bus would leave in an hour. He drank a soda, ate plain crackers. It was practice for the austerity to come, for the rigors of life on the road, the cold, the rain. Patalarga and Henry had spent much of the last days painting vivid portraits of the misery that awaited, and each horrifying description seemed to fill them with glee. “City boy,” they'd said to Nelson, “how will you ever survive life in the provinces?”

  Now, at the station, the television spat out the latest news, confirmed and unconfirmed: the accused killer was on suicide watch. An accomplice was being sought. Tearful fans were already gathering in front of the deceased’s home, laying flowers, holding candles, comforting one another. The singer had been dead for all of three hours.

  “How do they know where she lives?” asked Henry. “Who told them?”

  “Lived,” said Patalarga.

  Nelson had only a vague notion of who this dead singer was. In this bus station, on this night, among these fellow travelers, admitting such a thing would be like declaring oneself a foreigner. He’d always been taught it was two different countries: the city, and everything else. Some lamented the stark division, some celebrated it, but no one questioned it. Tonight, their bus would leave the city, and tomorrow when they woke, they’d be in the provinces. In truth, here at the bus station, where everyone was in mourning, it was as if they were already there.

  “Did you say your good-byes?” Henry asked, interrupting his daydreams.

  “I did.”

  Henry furrowed his brow, very serious. “Because we’re entering the world of the play now, Alejo, its constructed universe. Give in to it.”

  “I’m giving in.”

  “Once we leave, none of this exists.”

  Nelson glanced about the crowded and dilapidated bus station. A few yards from them, a child slept on an uneven pile of luggage.

  “It’s so hard to say good-bye.”

  Henry threw a gentle arm around Nelson. “I know it is, Alejo. I know.”

  They were called to board just before midnight. The waiting room of the bus station came to life as everyone shook off their drowsiness and stepped out into the warm night. The bus idled loudly. The passengers lined up to force their overstuffed bags into the hold. There were smiles on most of the faces, Nelson noticed; no one was immune to the allure of travel. Even a night bus has some glamour, if only you let yourself see it.

  Just before the bus pulled out, a thin boy in a baseball cap came aboard. He was chewing gum, and held a small video camera in his right hand. The boy moved slowly down the aisle, panning left to right and back again, stopping for a second or two on each passenger. Some smiled, some waved, some blew kisses. Henry flashed an enthusiastic two thumbs-up. When the camera came to Nelson, he stared dumbly into the lens, not quite understanding.

  Henry whispered in his ear. “Smile. In case we plunge off a cliff and die, this is how your mother will remember you.”

  Nelson forced a smile.

  When I went to the bus company to ask for this video, I was all but laughed at. “Are you serious?” the man asked.

  I told him I was. I had the date, destination, and time of departure.

  “If no one dies,” he said, “we just record over it.”

  The ride out of the city was slow, but after an hour they came to the capital’s eastern limits. Nelson didn’t sleep but looked out the window instead, hoping to see something that might catch his eye. There was only darkness. A movie came on the bus’s television—the kind his mother would have liked—but he tuned it out, and went over the script instead, replaying The Idiot President in his mind: its rhythms, its atmosphere, its famous gloom, which, contrary to what he’d been told, was in fact completely describable.

  Henry hadn’t known at the station how right he was, exactly how hard Nelson’s good-byes had been. He’d arranged to see Ixta that afternoon, at a park in La Julieta. As they strolled, talking about nothing in particular, Nelson, with his heart thrumming in his chest, held a parallel conversation with himself: Should he, or shouldn’t he? Was now the time to tell her? It was a warm day by the sea, and the vastness of the ocean was always remarkable to him. The boardwalk was full of joggers and skateboarders, and the sun shone through a scrim of early-autumn clouds hovering at the edge of the horizon. The longer they walked, the quieter they became, until Nelson couldn’t bear his uneasiness. They’d come to another seaside park, this one with an unused lighthouse surrounded by a low wooden fence, so short you could step over it. Many had—they’d written their names, pairs of them, mostly, along the lighthouse’s curving base of white brick.

  “If they really wanted to protect it,” Ixta said, “they’d make the fence higher.”

  Nelson considered the fence, as if it might yield a great secret.

  “I love you,” he said.

  It just came out that way. He’d said it to the fence, to the lighthouse, to the wind. He’d done it, in other words, all wrong. He began to apologize, but it wasn’t clear what for.

  Ixta didn’t respond. She told me later that she wasn’t surprised, or overcome with emotion; she felt something different, something simpler. Relief. Weeks had become months, and Ixta had begun to fear she was inventing it all. She hadn’t thought of herself as having an affair, but from the outside, that’s exactly what it would have appeared to be. She’d fully understood this only a few days before. They’d entered the mirrored lobby of a cheap hotel on the side streets of the Metropole, and she’d happened to catch a glimpse of herself, arm in arm, with Nelson. Ixta never really thought much about their age difference, but suddenly, at that moment, it was noticeable—not her age; but rather, his youth. Nelson had the greedy, callow look of a boy about to get what he wants.

  Why, she thought then, should I give it to him?

  And: Don’t I want things that he won’t give me?

  She was a woman sleeping with someone who was not her partner. It was an affair, and perhaps that’s all it was. If he claimed to love her, did that make it different?

  “Well?” Nelson asked. He still hadn’t mustered the courage to look at her.

  Ixta told me later: “It was like he felt the world owed him an award, just because he’d managed to say what was on his mind. It was about him, not me. I told him I didn’t trust him anymore. That it had all dragged on for too long. That I was sorry.”

  “Is that all?”

  “And I wished him a safe trip.”

  Ixta paused here, looked up, and bit her lip. Perhaps she expected me to interrupt, but I didn’t.

  “You know the truth? I almost felt bad. I felt regret—just for a moment. And I half expected that he’d call my name, but he didn’t. He just let me walk away. I left him at the lighthouse, and I remember thinking, he’ll probably write our names on the bricks, or something similarly helpless. He always liked those sorts of gestures. The useless kind.”

  She broke off, shut her eyes.

  Both Patalarga and Henry report that Nelson seemed “not himself” on the evening of their departure. “Pensive” was the word Patalarga used; Henry went a bit further, calling him “dour.” While they discussed with some curiosity the particulars of the singer and her murderer, Nelson offered no opinion on the matter. Once on the bus, they report, he pulled out his notebook and began to write.

  Nelson could have chosen to share the story of his afternoon, or the content of his conversation with Ixta, but he didn’t. In fact, he’d mentioned her only a couple of times, never by name, keeping her and a lot of things about himself private from his collaborators during those first weeks of the tour. He didn’t tell them about Sebastián’s passing, for example, or much more about Francisco beyond the vagaries he’d shared that first afternoon. He never showed
them his plays, though he did admit, after some questioning, that he wrote.

  That neither of the Diciembre veterans asked why he was upset should not, in my opinion, be interpreted as a lack of empathy on their part but rather as an indication of who exactly these three men were in relation to one another at the beginning of the tour. While Patalarga and Henry were old friends, they were also, in very important ways, strangers, two middle-aged men getting to know each other again after many years. They were working together for the first time since Henry had been imprisoned. And as for Nelson, the fact that they liked him, that they’d chosen him from among the dozens of actors who’d auditioned for the role of Alejo, does not imply any intimacy.

  So, a snapshot of Diciembre as the tour begins: Nelson, troubled, fills the pages of his journal with words about Ixta and his heartbreak, before finally dozing off some three hours from the capital; Henry, beside him, attempting little or no conversation, dons a satin eye mask from the play’s wardrobe, and promptly falls into a dream about the prison, about Rogelio; and Patalarga, who hasn’t been to a movie theater in five or six years, sits across the aisle from his companions, engrossed by the action film blinking on the bus’s tiny television.

  IXTA WALKED HOME that afternoon a little dazed, trying to fix the details of her conversation with Nelson within the trajectory of their relationship. It had once seemed that the world would defer politely to their whims, but the disappointing last eight months had been a slow unraveling of all that optimism, a break and a period of mourning, a faltering attempt to recapture what had been lost. Doom. Starting over. Now this, whatever it was.