At Night We Walk in Circles (12 page)

NELSON'S MOTHER ALSO RECEIVED
a phone call that night, but whether it was before or after the conversation with Ixta is not known. Mónica doesn't remember hearing anguish or heartbreak in his voice, but then again, she reminded me, her younger son was an actor, a boy who'd kept more than his share of secrets over the years. There's another possibility: that she was so surprised and happy to have Nelson on the line, she simply overlooked any hints about his emotional state. In any case, Mónica is certain he didn't mention Ixta—in fact, he hadn't mentioned her for many months. It was as if this girl disappeared from his life. Mónica had liked Ixta well enough, and even felt responsible, indirectly, for the pairing, but Nelson was young, and these things happen. The heart mends. Life is long. When I told Mónica that they were still seeing each other, more or less, up until the date of Nelson's departure, she was surprised.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Really?”

That night, Nelson and his mother spoke in very broad terms about the tour, about how he was getting along with his fellow actors. Nelson claimed to have learned a lot about his craft, and assured her he was enjoying being away. (Perhaps he
had
called his mother first.) He said he'd been thinking about his future.

“What have you been thinking?” Mónica asked her son.

He sighed. “That I should go, finally.”

Nelson's mother didn't need this to be explained. She knew what “go” meant, understood the implicit destination. Nor did she disagree, really. “The tour was giving him perspective,” she told me, “and that was a good thing. Sebastián and I pushed him to leave for years, but after my husband died, all that was put on hold. I wondered if it was my fault, but Nelson never said anything. I should have kept pushing him, but the truth is, I was too tired. It was selfish, but I needed him.”

“What did you tell him that night?” I asked.

“That I supported him, no matter what he wanted to do. You know, the original plan was New York or California, but even San Jacinto was a step. For years, he'd never left the city. After Sebastián passed, he stayed by my side. His friends went on vacation, they piled in cars and went on camping trips down the coast. And he hardly ever went with them. And yes, maybe he resented me for it. So now, in a way, I was happy to hear him say he wanted to leave. I'd been waiting for it.”

About the tour, Nelson told his mother the play was “a hit”—though he qualified this by saying that the word meant something different out there in the provinces. He laughed then, and Mónica recalls how beautiful her son's laughter sounded to her. Nelson explained that successful shows might be performed before fifteen or twenty spectators, in ad hoc venues where the very concept of “a full house” didn't apply. How, for example, does one “sell out” a windswept field at the edge of town? If every known resident is there, huddled together for warmth in the limitless space? If the tickets themselves cost nothing, does it even matter? If a few of the audience members raise their hands to ask questions in the middle of a performance—is this a good thing? And if you pause in the middle of a scene to answer these questions (as Henry had one strange night, “a presidential press conference,” he called it) is that really winning theater?

“Yes,” Mónica recalls saying. She was enthusiastic: “It is!”

She was not an old woman, not yet, but the last two months hadn't been easy. She spent hours each day “tidying up”—this was the phrase she used, though it sounded more to me like a kind of archaeology, or an intensely personal subspecialty of that discipline: exploring one's own solitude, as if it were a dark cave. She might sit reading a paperback Sebastián had given her in 1981, the handwritten inscription no longer legible, the letters fuzzy and blurred, but special all the same. How and why had he given it to her? What had he been trying to tell her? Had he imagined that she'd be reading the inscription twenty years later, when he was dead and she was alone? A weekend afternoon might find her refolding a dresser drawer full of Francisco's old clothes, items she'd saved these many years for no reason she could recall, and then going to the old photo albums to verify that her elder son had actually worn them. It was as if she were fact-checking her own life. A full day could pass like this. She didn't enter Nelson's room, not yet, but felt certain that each night, as she slept, his things spread around the house of their own accord, to new and unexpected hiding places. Scripts appeared behind sofa cushions, a pair of laceless sneakers materialized in the pantry behind a bag of rice. Someone, she was sure, was moving the family pictures.

Now she stood in the kitchen, holding the receiver with both hands.

“How was your birthday?” Mónica asked.

“Great.”

“When will you be back?”

From San Jacinto, Nelson rattled off the names of a few towns they hoped to visit in the coming weeks. It seems the word about Diciembre and its tour had spread, and many municipalities were interested in hosting them. The rains were ending, the festival season would soon be under way, and Henry had decided Diciembre would take advantage of these potentially large and boisterous audiences. Why wouldn't they? Was there any hurry to come home?

“Of course there isn't,” Mónica said. “As long as you're happy, that's what matters.”

“Are you doing all right, Mom?”

She told Nelson she was fine.

To me, she confessed: “I'd already had two months to begin imagining my life without him.”

•   •   •

HENRY AND PATALARGA AGREE:
When Nelson stepped out of the call center, he seemed a little stricken. They made room for him on the bench, but he opted to stand before them instead, hands buried in his pockets, chin to his chest.

“What happened?” Henry asked, but Nelson didn't answer, so they watched him, swaying left to right, looking down at his feet. A minute passed like this.

“Are you going to say anything?” Henry asked.

“Are you cold?” Patalarga said. “Should we go to the hotel?”

“She's pregnant,” Nelson answered, still looking down. His voice was soft, almost inaudible over the humming noise of the park where they sat. He looked up then, and they saw his helpless eyes, the puffy skin beneath them. He pursed his lips: he had the bewildered expression of a student trying to solve a problem he doesn't quite understand.

“The baby isn't mine. That's what she told me. I asked her how she knew, and she said she just did. I asked her if she'd taken a test, and she said that was none of my business.”

“Women know these things,” Henry said.

“I'm sorry,” Patalarga added.

“She's going to marry that other guy.”

(Ixta is adamant that she never said this: “Nelson invented that. I'm sure he believed it, but Mindo and I never had plans to be married.” She found the idea laughable.)

Henry stood and embraced his protégé.

“Did he cry?” I asked.

Henry frowned at the question in a way that suddenly embarrassed me. “No, I don't think so, though I'm not sure why it matters.”

So either Nelson cried or he didn't. They spent the next few hours walking the streets of San Jacinto, rather directionless, trying to raise Nelson's spirits. It wasn't easy. Henry says he offered to cancel the next day's show, but Nelson wouldn't hear of it. The show must go on, et cetera, et cetera. Patalarga suggested they get drunk, an easy option, and cheap, considering the altitude; but Nelson shrugged off the idea. “He wasn't into it,” Patalarga told me. “Everything we offered, he turned down. I think he just wanted us to keep him company.”

“Did he say much?”

“He asked if anything like this had ever happened to either of us.”

In response, Henry explained that heartbreak is like shattered glass: while it's impossible that two pieces could splinter in precisely the same pattern, in the end, it doesn't matter, because the effect is identical.

“I suppose so,” said Nelson.

To further prove the point, Henry told of his infidelities, from which he claimed to have derived no pleasure, none whatsoever, and his subsequent divorce. He did not mention Rogelio, not yet—though his old lover would be making an appearance, indirectly, that very same night. One could call it serendipity or coincidence or luck (which comes in two, often linked, varieties); one could also just call it
life
.

Patalarga took up the argument, and told of his move at age seventeen from his hometown in the mountains to the city; and the girl he'd left behind.

“What was her name?” Nelson asked.

As it happens, I asked the same thing.

Her name was Mercedes—Mechis—and they were madly in love. She wanted to believe he'd come back for her, and Patalarga was afraid to let her think any different. So they conspired to never speak of it, both assuming the other believed this fiction. In fact, neither of them actually did. Once in the city, Patalarga changed his name, changed his life. They wrote letters for a time, but these fizzled out. He was embarrassed to tell her about his new friends. He never forgot her, but something shifted: he'd be riding the bus to the university, and realize, suddenly, that he hadn't thought of her in months. The longer this went on, the more ashamed he was. He didn't go home for three years, by which time he was a different person entirely. When they saw each other the first time, he expected she'd yell at him, curse him, beat him with small, closed fists and ask him why. He was prepared for this, but what actually happened was much worse.

“What happened?” asked Nelson.

Nothing. Mechis had married another man. She had a child, a little boy, who must have been eighteen months old, standing wobbly but on his own two feet, and clinging tightly to his father's pant leg. Mechis's husband was friendly, and shook Patalarga's hand with an appalling lack of jealousy. And Mechis? She was entirely indifferent to Patalarga, as if she didn't even recognize him.

“That night, I cried like a baby.”

“That's awful.”

“You know, it was probably just the altitude,” Henry offered, which only managed to draw a weak smile out of Nelson.

Eventually, they ended up in the main plaza, the one section of San Jacinto that can conceivably be described as pleasant. There was a giant stone cathedral lit dramatically with floodlights, and glowing like an apparition; at the other end, a recently built hotel fronted with greenish mirrored glass; hideous, but also startling, as if an alien spacecraft had landed in the center of town. Somehow the contrast was less troubling than intriguing. A troubadour sang before a sparse audience of foreigners and elderly, the colonial-era fountain bubbling behind him. There were no moto taxis, which gave the few blocks around this plaza a kind of solemnity banished from the rest of the bustling city. Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson strolled along the sidewalks, and happened by a shuttered tourist office. Its broad window featured a few posters of local attractions, and they paused before it, their attention drawn not by those images but by a very large and detailed regional map. The villages and towns were noted with black dots, the routes between them marked in red. As if by common agreement, the three actors stopped, all of them curious to find themselves on this map, trace their circuitous path through the mountains, the lowlands, and back. They placed their fingers to the window, laughing as the name of one village or another brought up some outlandish memory. Here we killed! Here we bombed! Here we triumphed over the elements! Henry would later tell me how happy it made him to see Nelson laughing along with them. They'd been through a lot together: eight weeks and a few days of movement, the only constant being the play they performed every evening. Different audiences in different towns, each with its own history and character, with its own unique interpretation of the play, and of the actors themselves. In one village, at the conclusion of the show, the local elder stood before the audience and, with great ceremony, gave them each a strip of long, rubbery material, as a gift. Something like leather, but different. To chew? To smoke? It turned out to be the desiccated tongue of a bull. No one knew what to do with it. Henry thanked the elder, the man's wrinkled face contorting into a pleasant smile, then a boy stood and tied the bands around each of Diciembre's wrists. Tightly.

Everyone clapped.

And the map seemed to contain it all. It was as if it had been made for them.

“Is this where you first saw the name of Rogelio's village?” I asked Henry during our first interview, many months later.

He nodded gravely. “It is.”

“And what was your reaction?”

“It was just one of those things.” He paused, and took a deep breath. “One of the many details I'd forgotten. Rogelio had told me where he was from—he'd told me everything—but if you'd asked me just a moment before what the name of that village was, I never would have remembered it.”

“But when you saw it . . .”

“I knew.”

“Did you tell Nelson and Patalarga right away?”

Henry did more than that: he placed his index finger on the dot next to this town's name, and upon realizing it wasn't far, a couple of hours at most from San Jacinto, he shuddered. He fell silent. He'd begun—dimly—to comprehend the possibility this town represented. A way to close off the past, to make peace with it.

Had he forgotten Nelson's heartbreak? Was he succumbing once again to his habitual selfishness?

“No,” Henry told me. “I thought we'd all benefit.”

He said the name to himself and felt its power, his finger pressed against the window, holding fast to the point floating on the map. To me, he explained: it might as well have been a flashing light, or a star.

“Gentlemen, there's been a change in plans,” Henry said. “
This
is where we're going next.”