At Night We Walk in Circles

by Daniel Alarcón

  This is what we know: the two young men left the theater headed in the direction of the plaza. A fine drizzle hung in the air, and the sidewalks were slippery. Mindo was very drunk, and they walked carefully so as not to fall, one empty city block and then another, shuffling as best they could through the curtain of fog. For a long time, they didn’t speak.

  “Do you love her?” Mindo finally asked. They were five or six blocks from the theater by then.

  “Yes,” Nelson said. And then: “But she doesn’t love me back.”

  Mindo nodded. “So at least we have that in common.”

  We know they made it to the plaza, that they walked diagonally across it and sought refuge at the Wembley. This was Nelson’s suggestion. It was a slow night, and one of the white-haired bartenders sat behind the counter, doing a crossword puzzle. He remembers when they came in, about a quarter to one in the morning. For every crossword, he wrote down his start and end times, so he was able to provide the police with a fairly accurate estimate. He told them he knew Nelson, recognized him: he’d served drinks to Sebastián back when Nelson was still a boy, and he’d seen him a few times after rehearsals. The other one, Mindo, he’d never seen before.

  “The tall one was drunk, which was none of my business. I shook hands with the kid. I hadn’t seen him in a few months.”

  They chatted for a few moments, and then Nelson ordered a liter of beer and two glasses. Mindo watched the exchange, unimpressed.

  “My old man used to bring me here,” Nelson said when they’d sat.

  “Your dad,” Mindo mused. “Did he mess with other men’s women too?”

  They locked eyes. The evening could still go any which way, and Nelson knew it. He hadn’t decided what would happen. What he wanted to happen. He took a deep breath.

  “My old man was a prince.”

  Mindo sucked his teeth. “Skips a generation.”

  “I guess it must,” Nelson said.

  Just then the old bartender appeared, all smiles. He had the beer and a couple of glasses. Patalarga had lent Nelson some cash, and he paid right away. Mindo didn’t protest, only watched suspiciously, examining the transaction as if attempting to decipher a magic trick.

  “Are you all right?” Nelson asked.

  “Of course I’m all right.”

  “Because you don’t look all right.”

  The bartender, when we spoke, offered much the same assessment. He stood over them for a moment, observing. “The taller one, he looked like hell.”

  “I’m fine,” said Mindo. He looked up at the bartender. “And you, old man, why are you still here?”

  The bartender frowned and went back to his crossword puzzle.

  “What were you doing with Ixta?” Mindo asked once the beer had been poured.

  Nelson considered his rival. In this bar, beneath this warm light, any hint of menace was gone. He was hurt; that was all.

  “Just talking,” Nelson said.

  “Yeah? What about?”

  “Not much.” Nelson turned away. The content of that morning’s conversation was so disappointing he could scarcely bring himself to think of it. “I was surprised at how little we had to say.”

  “Not what you’d planned.”

  Nelson shook his head. “It wasn’t what I’d hoped.” He paused, and looked up at Mindo. It was merciless to push forward, with more courage than he’d had that morning with Ixta, when he’d most needed it.

  “I wanted to talk about us. Me and her.”

  He enunciated these last three words carefully, clearly.

  Mindo laughed. “You don’t have an us to talk about. There is no us.”

  “There was once. There might be.”

  For a few moments they didn’t say much, each drank their beer, never breaking eye contact. Mindo processed the brazenness of it, shaking his head. He set his beer down.

  “But we’re the ones having a baby! You get that, right? She and I. Me and her.”

  Nelson shook his head. “How do you know it’s yours?”

  With that, the bar’s quiet evening was shattered.

  When questioned (by me, by police) the Wembley’s old bartender recalled this moment very clearly. Mindo stood abruptly, lunging at Nelson and tipping the table over. Beer was spilled, one of the glasses shattered, and in an instant a few of the tables nearby were at the ready; the men, who a moment before had been drinking peacefully, were standing now, alert and prepared to intervene or defend themselves. When they saw it was just these two, everyone stepped back, giving Nelson and Mindo the room they required. They tussled for a while, neither very skilled but neither relenting, until they were on the ground, the both of them. It fell to the old bartender to break things up. Men like him are devoted to their service. Perhaps this was for the best; regarding barroom scuffles, he might have been the most experienced server in the city.

  “Boys! Please!” he shouted, because they were all boys to him. “Stop!”

  Nelson and Mindo stopped. Boys always did.

  “Get off the floor!”

  They stood.

  He had them now. He told me later that he was sure of it. If they couldn’t be civilized, he said, they’d have to leave. Did they really want to leave?

  In case they didn’t believe him, the bartender added, “Look at it out there!”

  The drizzle was heavy now; they could see it swirling in the light just outside the window. He went on: “Outside, it’s cold; outside, it’s wet. Inside, it’s warm, and inside there’s beer. But inside, there is no fighting. Do you understand?”

  He’d given this speech before.

  Nelson and Mindo both nodded gravely; then they shook themselves off, gathered their things, and went outside.

  NELSON ARRIVED at the Olympic past two, opening the gate with the key Patalarga had given him. He was soaked and out of breath. Henry and Patalarga had all but finished the bottle of rum, and were lying about the stage, now covered with cushions and blankets, like a pasha’s den.

  “You’re back!” Henry said.

  “You’re alive!” Patalarga shouted.

  He was only joking, but then Nelson stepped into the light. He was bruised and scraped. He peeled off his wet coat, ripped at the sleeve. He slumped onto the stage, gesturing for the rum, and Henry quickly poured him a glass.

  “What happened?”

  Nelson downed a shot.

  The story he told his friends that night is the same as the one he’d later tell police.

  He and Mindo stepped out of the Wembley. There was no plan. “We just knew, I guess, that we weren’t done fighting.” They stood for a while beneath the streetlamp just outside the door of the bar, breathing the damp air. From inside the bar, faces pressed up against the window, as if expecting a show.

  Mindo swayed. “You’re fucking her?”

  Nelson didn’t respond. He didn’t have to.

  “I knew it.” Then: “I’m going to kill you.”

  According to the old bartender, everyone heard it. “The drunk boy looked very upset.”

  Nelson wasn’t rattled. He held his hands out, palms up.

  “No you’re not.”

  There was no aggression in his voice, no defiance. It was just a statement of fact. He went on: “I shouldn’t have said what I said. I’m sorry.” Nelson gestured toward the Wembley. “They’re all watching. Are you really going to kill me in front of all these people?”

  Mindo cupped a hand over his eyes and turned toward the windows of the bar.

  “Fine,” he said.

  They walked toward the plaza, and at this point there are no other witnesses besides Nelson. The plaza was empty except for a few stray taxis, and the occasional drunk stumbling out of one of the underground bars. The night was cold and uninviting, and they walked as fast as they could manage on the slippery streets. A few blocks on, Mindo started to talk. According to Nelson: “He was upset, but he seemed fatalistic about it all. I wasn’t his rival. He said he knew that. Only Ixta had answers. She
’d loved him once, and now she didn’t. I didn’t know what to tell him.”

  “It’s the baby I worry about,” Mindo said.

  Nelson knew the streets of the Old City. He knew, for example, that at certain hours of night, on the narrower streets, you don’t use the sidewalks. This is common sense. You walk straight down the very center of the road, eyes sharp, scanning for the thief that might pounce from the shadow of a recessed doorway. He and every student at the Conservatory had been robbed at least once. For most, once was all it took; then you learned. Nelson didn’t have to think about it. This was instinct.

  They were walking down the center of a narrow street called Garza when their conversation was interrupted by the light tap of a horn. They moved to the sidewalk, still talking, and barely registered the station wagon that rolled by. It pulled over just ahead of them, and two young men got out. A moment later, it took off, disappearing into the fog. Still Nelson and Mindo thought nothing of it. Just ahead, the two men dawdled, and, according to Nelson, “When we passed them, one of them pushed me hard against the wall.” That’s how it began.

  Both assailants were young, both snarling, and it wasn’t a holdup—it was an attack. A beat down. Everything happened very fast: Mindo and Nelson and these two violent strangers. No conversation. No demands. No negotiation. Nelson never saw their faces. It was fight or flight.

  At the first opportunity, he flew.

  “What about Mindo?” Patalarga asked, just as the police would later. “Why didn’t you help Mindo?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Nelson ran as fast as he could. “I should’ve gone toward the plaza, but at the time I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to get away.”

  One of the attackers was chasing, but Nelson didn’t look back. He ran for three blocks, turned one corner and then another, sprinting until his lungs burned. When he finally stopped he was six or seven blocks from the scene of the attack, standing at the edge of a park he’d never seen before, in a tumbledown section of the Old City known as El Anclado. He saw no one in the deserted streets: not his attackers, not Mindo, not a single person he could ask for help.

  “So what did you do?” Patalarga asked.

  “I sat for a moment to catch my breath. I figured out where I was, roughly, and then I headed back.”

  His destination was the Olympic, where he would be safe, but first he wanted to see about Mindo. He walked quickly, almost frantically. The fog was heavier than before, heavier than he’d ever seen it. When he got to the corner of Garza and Franklin, he peered down the street, to the spot where they’d been jumped.

  He saw nothing, and breathed a sigh of relief.

  “I was frightened,” he said to Patalarga and Henry. “I didn’t go any closer. I just assumed Mindo had done what I did. I assumed he’d gotten away.”

  In fact, he hadn’t. Mindo had crawled into one of the recessed doorways, where he was almost completely hidden. That’s where a passerby found him the next morning, with five knife wounds to his stomach and chest.

  23

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Henry offered to give Nelson a ride to the Monument District. It was understood that Nelson had to see Ixta, to make sure Mindo was all right, and to apologize for any trouble he might have caused between them. Traffic was unusually light, and though the two friends didn’t talk much, both found it comforting not to ride alone. Neither had slept more than a few hours. They listened to the news on the radio and, in particular, to the tenor of the announcers, which fluctuated unexpectedly between horror and amusement. It was frankly confusing, and perhaps this was the point: bad news was almost indistinguishable from good, or perhaps there was simply no such thing as good news anymore.

  “You don’t drive like I thought you would,” Nelson said when they were near their destination. “I somehow expected you’d be more erratic.”

  To Henry, this sounded about right. He did almost everything erratically, but behind the wheel, he’d always been possessed with a certain calm. The congested streets of the capital disturbed most drivers, but not him. He had a surprisingly high tolerance for traffic jams. When he was in Collectors, he told Nelson now, he sometimes sat in bed, looking up at the ceiling, and imagined himself behind the wheel of a car, any car, on any city street. He and Rogelio shared this love, in fact: the tranquillity that came only from being alone, at the wheel, that sense of autonomy. He’d first conceived of The Idiot President while driving a tan 1976 Opel hatchback to visit a friend who lived outside the city. In an alternate life, if he’d been a criminal, Henry mused, he would have made a decent wheelman.

  “Do you drive?” he asked Nelson now.

  The young actor shook his head. He’d never learned. Henry smiled and offered to teach him. After all, Nelson would need to know, if he were to go through with his plans to travel to the United States.

  At the mention of this, Nelson frowned.

  “I was trying to be positive,” Henry told me.

  Nelson confessed that he was spooked by what had happened the night before. Hopefully that had been the worst of it. Nelson held his hands up, as if to offer proof of his nerves. “Look,” he said, “they’re shaking!”

  They were in the Monument District now, with its quiet, smoothly paved streets, its sleek houses shielded by high walls. Nelson turned his attention to the roads, pointing out a few turns ahead. “It’s a tricky part of town.”

  “This,” Henry told me when we spoke, “was when I began to notice the station wagon behind us.”

  “Did you mention it to the police?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “I told the police everything. And they believed nothing. Then again, let’s say a car was following us. What does that prove?”

  It was a light blue station wagon, and it had been behind them for a long while now. Henry recalls thinking how strange it was, that he was likely imagining it—a low-speed chase along an otherwise deserted street. They took a turn, and the station wagon followed, just a few car lengths behind.

  “Did you see the driver?” I asked.

  He didn’t. He couldn’t.

  In any case, Henry didn’t mention his suspicion to Nelson, who had enough on his mind; later he saw this as a mistake. Instead he slowed the car to a stop, and kept his eyes on the rearview mirror. The blue station wagon slowed too, and then, almost reluctantly, drove on, past them and off into the neighborhood beyond. Henry and Nelson heard a hot blast of cumbia as the car rolled by.

  “Why’d you stop?” Nelson asked.

  “That car needed to pass.”

  They drove a little farther on, and pulled up in front of the filmmaker’s house. Nelson got out to ring the bell, just as he had the previous morning, and Henry watched. “I saw him rocking back and forth on his feet, looking nervous and pale. Then the door opened. He leaned in, talking to someone I couldn’t see.”

  That someone was the filmmaker, who, by his own admission, “was not having a good morning.” Ixta hadn’t come to work, nor had she called. She wasn’t answering her phone, and he was annoyed. When he opened the door, he was expecting to find her, not Nelson.

  “I shooed him away,” the filmmaker told me. “I didn’t want him around. He looked terrible. And I didn’t like the way he looked at me. She didn’t come in today, that’s all I told him. He tried to peer past me, as if he thought I might be lying, and at that point … well, I just shut the door in his face.”

  Nelson rang the doorbell again, and the scene was repeated, with a little more vehemence. Again the door was shut. This time Nelson ambled back to the car, a little dazed, and told Henry what had happened.

  “So what do we do?” Henry asked. He glanced at his watch involuntarily as he asked. It was already past ten. On this particular day, he had his first class in an hour. He needed to get moving. What Henry meant by his question was: Where can I leave you?

  “I’ll walk from here,” Nelson said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Nels
on didn’t say where he intended to walk. Back to the theater, Henry assumed, though Nelson went to Ixta’s instead. The two friends embraced.

  “The next time I saw him,” Henry told me, “was that night on the television news.”

  IXTA HAD BEEN WOKEN at around five in the morning by a ringing doorbell. It was a policeman. He took a look at her belly, blanched, and asked her to sit. She was still rubbing sleep from her eyes. They sat. The policeman’s voice trembled as he spoke.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry,” the officer said, then asked if she knew a man named Mindo.

  But for a few stray details, her memory of the morning ends there. Mindo, dead. She was already beginning to lose herself to the hysterics that would take over for the next six hours.

  The officer meted out in small doses what information he had: the exact location where Mindo’s body was found (four and a half blocks to the west of the Olympic, slumped in a recessed doorway on Garza); the cause of death (bleeding from multiple knife wounds). No wallet, telephone, or identification had been found, so they were treating this death as a robbery and homicide. They’d found her name beneath a drawing Mindo had made in his notebook.

  “Did Mindo have any enemies?” the policeman asked. He’d already pulled out a small reporter’s notebook.

  “I just remember that nothing he was saying made any sense,” Ixta told me.

  “Enemies?” she asked. “Enemies?”

  She cursed the policeman and called him a coward, while he tried in vain to calm her down. A neighbor heard the commotion and knocked on the door to find out what was going on. At one point, Ixta passed out. Her mother was summoned. Her brother. A medic. And just like that, the small apartment she’d shared with Mindo was full: more family; cousins; friends of hers; friends of Mindo; and eventually, another policeman, a woman this time. Their shoes piled at the door; a dozen mourners and cops standing around in their socks.