At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  “Oh yes, and her name is Anabel,” the elderly woman added, voice trembling. She pointed a thin, bony finger in the direction of the river, and sent the grateful visitor on his way.

  And so, by the early afternoon of his first day in T—, Henry had come to the place he never imagined he’d be: standing beneath the midday sun, on an empty, unpaved street, prepared to knock on the door of the house where his long-dead lover had been raised.

  And though I was still in the city on that day, my life begins to intersect with Nelson’s here, at this precise moment. My mother reports that she saw Henry just then. She remembers him for two reasons: one, because he was a stranger, and there are no strangers in T—; and two, because he looked nervous. (“What is there to be nervous about in a town like ours?”) She happened to be walking out of our house at the precise moment of Henry’s arrival, and this anxious stranger cleared his throat when he saw her.

  “Is this Mrs. Anabel’s house?” he asked.

  “And you know,” my mother admitted later, “I almost said it wasn’t, just because I didn’t like the looks of him.”

  But my mother is incapable of lying. Perhaps that’s why she never got used to life in the city.

  “Yes, dear, it certainly is,” she said. Then she hurried off to the plaza, already blushing.

  MEANWHILE, Patalarga and Nelson were engaged in a search of their own. They were looking for a place to perform. The kind but cautious man who ran the Imperial had demurred, though his underused balcony restaurant would have made a fine stage, indeed. He’d seemed so flummoxed by their inquiry that neither Patalarga nor Nelson pressed him. And anyway, there were other options, better ones: the municipal auditorium, though padlocked at the moment, wasn’t booked until September. Surely the mayor would open it up for a night, if they asked. At this hour, they’d be likely to find him in his fields, on the north side, just past the school. And as long as they were headed that way, the school itself could work too. There was a nice courtyard, suitable for an afternoon show, before the sun went down; the manager of the Imperial even gave them the name of the principal, a nice man, he said, who would be happy to talk, though they should speak loudly, since his hearing was basically shot.

  Nelson and Patalarga thanked him and walked north from the plaza in the direction of the school, over a decaying wooden structure which the locals called the New Bridge, and farther, out into the open valley.

  When I spoke with Patalarga, I was curious how Nelson seemed to him; after all, he’d heard the news from Ixta only the night before.

  “All right,” Patalarga said. “In surprisingly good spirits, in fact. We really had no idea why we’d come to this town, and the newness of it gave him something to focus on.”

  But it wasn’t new, exactly; in fact, in terms of Diciembre’s tour, it represented a return to normal. They’d spent the last eight weeks in ramshackle towns just like T—; out-of-the-way places accustomed to long, uneventful days. The anomalous San Jacinto interlude, with its crude nod to urbanism, couldn’t have seemed farther away now. The streets of T— were either hard-packed dirt or cracked cobblestone, but somehow the houses, even the empty ones, had a permanence to them that San Jacinto lacked. A city built almost from scratch in a decade is not likely to have much to recommend it (architecturally, culturally), whereas Rogelio’s hometown, my hometown, even in its worn-down state, seemed destined to last.

  Nelson was quiet as they walked, his eyes on the hills, on the sky, on this preposterously scenic valley. Streams of snowmelt bubbled down from the higher elevations, flowing into the creeks and then into the hand-carved canals that fed the surrounding fields. A boy in a red sweater hurried past, pulling a goat by a long rope; Patalarga and Nelson watched the child bound along the path toward the school.

  “Charming,” was how Patalarga described it. As striking as any place they’d been on the tour; tumbledown and imperfect, surely a difficult place to live, but lacking the malice of, say, a mining encampment. Or the primitiveness of a logging town. Or the squalor of a smuggling depot. And he was right: T— was different. There was no economic activity to speak of besides farming and the twice-yearly festivals, which brought the town back to life, or to a kind of life. The rest of the year was quiet, and it was this calm that Patalarga and Nelson now breathed in as if it were mountain air itself. The long rainy season had finally ended, and there were no clouds marring the blue sky. In the midday sun, you could feel comfortable in short sleeves.

  “It’s beautiful,” Nelson said.

  They were the first words Patalarga had heard from him since they’d started their walk. Then he added: “I forgot to say congratulations, you know?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Nelson shook his head. “When she told me she was pregnant, I didn’t say congratulations.” He slowed now, head bent toward the ground. “That’s what you’re supposed to say, right?”

  They were almost at the school, and could hear a group of children getting ready for recess—the bubbling of their laughter, their impatience. Nelson stopped. “Maybe Ixta’s pregnancy is good news.”

  “A baby is always good news,” said Patalarga.

  Nelson shook his head. “I mean good news for me.”

  His plans for life with Ixta—no matter how whimsical or undefined—might still be relevant. They could move in together, raise the child together. He told Patalarga that he’d woken that morning with the strangest feeling. He could see it now, the shape of another life. It could be his. She might still be his.

  For Patalarga, it was a balancing act between offering hope and realism. “So what are you doing here?” he said. “Why don’t you go back?”

  “I will. Soon. I have to.” Now he turned the question back on Patalarga: “What do you think I should do?”

  Nelson’s eyes blinked back the sun; he really wanted to know.

  “What did you tell him?” I asked.

  I met with Patalarga three times in the city. We ate meals together, and went over the history of Diciembre with old, yellowed programs in hand, laughing and marveling at the naive ambition of it all. We toured the shabby Olympic, imagining its past and future glory, drank beers at the Wembley as he recounted this story to me, and much more—details and anecdotes and confessions which haven’t made their way into the manuscript. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say we established a kind of rapport. He’s someone I could call up, even today, and expect a friendly conversation, perhaps even an invitation to drinks or dinner.

  But of all the questions I asked, for some reason, this was the one that made him most uncomfortable.

  His initial, unsatisfying answer was: “A lot of things. You have to remember I couldn’t have known what would happen.”

  “Sure,” I said, and let him sit with that.

  He rubbed his chin.

  “I told Nelson he had every option before him. I told him he could go home and fight for her. That he might win, or might lose, but that there was honor in both.”

  “And what did Nelson say?”

  “That he wasn’t a fighter, he never had been, and that scared him. And I said that was bullshit. Of course he was a fighter. He was more than that. He was a murderer, wasn’t he? Didn’t he kill me every night onstage?”

  At this Nelson laughed; Patalarga too.

  “That’s right,” Nelson said. “I’m a killer. Everyone be careful. Everyone watch out.”

  12

  BEFORE THE MIGRATIONS BEGAN, back when the place was still lively, T— was divided into four districts. The river cut the town into east and west, while the area north of the plaza was considered distinct in culture and class from the blocks south of it. Though T— was small, the lines dividing the districts from one another were sharp and not to be contested.

  Rogelio’s family, like mine, was from the southwest, a detail meaningless to all but a handful of elderly still living, and maybe a few thousand former residents of the town. It meant something to my father, but in spite of his best effort
s he was unable to pass this sentiment on to his children. This is what I learned about the southwest when I finally asked him: it was a district of large families and relatively modest homes. As a rule, the men did not own land to farm, but were sometimes hired to tend the fields of those who lived in the northwest, just seven or eight blocks away, but a world apart. The others were carpenters or stonemasons, later mechanics and drivers. The women of the district sewed curtains and hemmed clothes, earning small sums which they gave to their husbands for safekeeping. They were (the stereotype says) prone to gossip; specialists in spreading it; and, as a group, unashamed to be the protagonists of the local whispered hearsay. When their men went off in search of work, the women of the southwest district were rumored to receive male visitors late in the evening, after the children had been put to bed. If a marriage on the north side broke up, a woman from the southwest was assumed to be at fault. If something was stolen, the town’s single, part-time policeman visited the southwest, gathering the boys en masse to lecture them about property rights.

  As for T—’s children, they all went to the same school, and they might even be friends for a time, but by age nine or ten they’d fully internalized these petty district rivalries. Occasionally the boys fought, but it rarely got serious. As soon as the young men from the southwest understood their position, there were no more problems. They learned, as their fathers had before them, to bow their heads at the appropriate times.

  Nowadays, the lines between the districts tend to blur, so that, at this late date, a quasi-outsider like me finds it almost impossible to tell the difference. Every part of T— has been hollowed out, suffered almost equally from the neglect. At its height, the town was home to perhaps seven thousand residents—smaller, that is, than the total current population of Collectors—but when Diciembre arrived a little more than a thousand remained. My parents were the first new residents in more than three years, not counting the occasional highlander paid to look after a property during the rainy season. Rogelio’s older brother, Jaime, had moved a few hours away to San Jacinto when Rogelio was just thirteen, and had eventually become quite wealthy, though he spent very little of that money in T—.

  Rogelio’s mother, known to all as Mrs. Anabel, had stayed, along with her daughter, Noelia, who took care of her. The afternoon Henry arrived, after he’d had his brief interaction with my mother and finally gathered the courage to knock on the door—it was Noelia who received him.

  “He was polite,” she told me later, “a bit odd, surely, but most of all polite. At least at first. He asked to speak to my mother, said he was a friend of Rogelio’s, and of course I let him in. That’s what we do here. I thought he might have some news.”

  Henry walked in, marveling at the disrepair. Even an act as simple as closing the door, he noticed, required a delicate maneuver: lifting as you pushed it shut, then wiggling the warped and swollen wood into place. When it would seem to go no farther, Noelia gently shouldered the door, once, twice, three times, and it was only then that she was able to pull the lock. Henry found it astonishing. One day, he thought, she’ll find herself trapped inside.

  The house was just a handful of rooms surrounding a hopelessly overgrown garden. Noelia led him to the living room and asked him to wait. There was a brief, confusing moment when Henry thought Noelia was Rogelio’s mother, but she clarified with a laugh.

  “Heavens no!” she said. “He’s my little brother!”

  Noelia explained that Mrs. Anabel was just getting up from her nap. “She sleeps quite a lot these days. She isn’t well, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. I’m sorry to hear that. If it’s inconvenient, I can …”

  Noelia smiled. “No, no. Stay. We don’t get many visitors. I’ll bring her out in a moment.”

  Henry thanked her, and was left alone. There were a few wooden chairs, a bench along one wall, and a long narrow dining table adorned with a festive tablecloth, covered in thick clear plastic, and stacked with old newspapers. In the far corner sat a chest topped with a few family photographs in dusty frames, and at the sight of them, Henry froze. He took a step toward the chest, stopped again, and took a step back.

  When he described this moment during our interview, Henry felt it necessary to demonstrate his tentative dance for my benefit. He stood and stepped forward, back, forward, back. He wanted nothing more than to see the pictures, to examine them, one by one; to identify Rogelio as an infant, as a boy, as an adolescent, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. It had been more than a decade since he’d seen his old lover, and he had no real images with which to compare his memories. They’d never taken a picture together. Some of the wealthier inmates had their portraits painted, but neither Henry nor Rogelio had the money for that sort of thing. Meanwhile, this man had been coming to him in dreams since Diciembre left the city on tour. They rode together in Henry’s taxi, sipped coffee down by the boardwalk. In one of these dreams, Rogelio appeared as a student at Henry’s school, sitting uncomfortably at the tiny desk, frowning at an open book. As is often the case in dreams, it was the ordinariness of the images that made them so disconcerting, as if there were another life out there somewhere, one in which the two men lived side by side. This was what Henry was attempting to explain, and somehow, as he moved forward and back before me, I got a sense of his confusion. His uncertainty.

  He couldn’t stand to compare his memories or his dreams to the photos. What if he’d remembered incorrectly? What if his memory had tricked him?

  So he sat on the bench instead, as far from the photographs as he could manage, facing in the opposite direction.

  When Rogelio’s mother finally came, or rather, when she was brought to him, he marveled at how small she was. He recalled that Rogelio had described her as a commanding presence, a woman with an exacting character and booming voice capable of frightening men; but time had faded all that, and what remained was something lighter, gentler. Her fair skin was nearly translucent and intricately wrinkled, like the texture of a piece of aluminum foil, crumpled, and then flattened again by hand. Her thin hair had gone completely white, and she was cloaked in what seemed like dozens of layers, a shawl atop a sweater atop a long-sleeve blouse atop another sweater. She wore knee-high wool socks pulled over a pair of sweatpants, and over that, a blue skirt that fell to the middle of her calves. She belonged to a culture and a generation that respected the cold above all else, a culture that did not trust warmth, but saw it as an occasional and temporary illusion. Cold is permanent, eternal, reliable. The day begins and ends with it.

  I know this about her because my grandmother was the same way.

  Mrs. Anabel greeted Henry formally, though in a feeble voice: “So you’ve seen my little Rogelio?”

  Henry nodded.

  “That’s nice.”

  Noelia smiled. “Let’s sit in the sun, shall we, Mama?”

  The two women turned and went out into the bright afternoon. Noelia steered her mother through the garden with subtle, almost imperceptible movements. They covered the short distance slowly, pausing for a moment to admire one of the cats hiding in the brush. “Kitty, kitty, kitty,” Mrs. Anabel said, and laughed girlishly to herself. Henry watched the two of them from the doorway, admiring their progress, until they were both seated in a pair of low wooden chairs set near an outdoor woodstove. He was so impressed by the delicacy of the maneuver—how carefully Noelia helped her mother into the seat—that he forgot to offer a hand. And they were so used to being ignored, so accustomed to doing it all themselves, that they hardly noticed his oversight. Belatedly, he stepped out to join them, and took the seat facing Mrs. Anabel, their knees almost touching. Noelia sat to his right, the unlit stove serving as the fourth side of their square.

  At this point, everything was fine.

  They sat in the sun, the three of them enjoying this last instant of calm. Then Noelia asked how he knew Rogelio, and Henry smiled.

  It’s true he was prepared to unburden himself.

  “W
e met at Collectors,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Noelia asked.

  He let out a long sigh. “The prison. We shared a cell there, just before he died.”

  Then there was silence, long enough for Henry to realize something was terribly wrong. He saw it in their faces, in the way the women stared at him. Mrs. Anabel’s eyes got very small, and he watched the color drain from the old woman’s cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.

  Mrs. Anabel turned to her daughter. “Did he say died?”

  There was terror in her voice.

  “No, Mama.”

  “What does he mean?” She was speaking in a whisper now. Henry glanced toward the door, just a scamper across the courtyard. Five running steps, seven at most.

  “There must be some mistake,” Noelia said.

  The early-afternoon sun was blinding.

  “Rogelio is not in prison,” said Noelia. “Rogelio is not dead.”

  “He isn’t.”

  “He lives in California. He has for years.”

  There was something very hopeful in her tone.

  “I know,” Henry said, because he wanted more than anything to believe it. Maybe he’d gotten it all wrong. Maybe Rogelio was alive.

  “Rogelio is a mechanic, like my brother Jaime. He lives outside Los Angeles.”

  “Los Angeles,” Henry repeated.

  Noelia paused. “Are we talking about the same person?”

  Henry didn’t—couldn’t—answer.

  “My Rogelio,” said Mrs. Anabel, her voice cracking. “My baby.” With every sentence she uttered, she seemed to be getting smaller and smaller, curving her back and sinking lower in her seat, as if attempting to disappear.

  Suddenly Noelia got up and walked off.