At Night We Walk in Circles (13 page)

THERE WAS A MOMENT,
sometime in the third hour of my second interview with Mónica, when I found myself with one of the family's photo albums spread across my lap. This shouldn't have been unexpected, I suppose—in word and gesture I'd made it clear this was precisely the sort of access I was hoping for—and yet somehow it was. Already I knew more about Nelson than I did about many of the people I'd grown up with, including dear friends, including even family members. I was coming close to deciphering some of the mystery around our one brief encounter, but there was something else too. It wasn't so much what I'd learned, as how I'd learned it: Nelson's secrets revealed to me by his confidantes, his lovers, his classmates, people who'd seen fit to trust me, as if by sharing their various recollections, we could together accomplish something on his behalf. Re-create him. Reanimate him. Bring him back into the world. Piece by piece, I was gathering a sense of the richness of his inner life, and his imagination. I'd followed, at least partially, the trajectory Diciembre had taken a half a year before. I'd been to the same places, seen the same landscapes, talked to many of the same people. I'd tried to see things through Nelson's eyes, using his journals to guide me whenever possible. On good days, I felt I was succeeding.

Now it was January 2002. I sat on the sofa of Nelson's childhood home with his mother, listening to her stories of this shy, sensitive boy whom she'd raised into a man. She cried a little, apologized, then cried some more.

And I was turning the pages of this photo album, under Mónica's watchful eye, when I came across a picture of Nelson and Francisco, circa 1983, posing before the monkey pen at the zoo. Neither Mónica nor Sebastián are in the frame, the brothers stand alone in the foreground. Francisco looks bored, antsy, but Nelson is a guileless five-year-old, absolutely charmed by what he sees. His smile is goofy, his brown eyes wide. He has one arm around his brother's waist, and another pointing back over his shoulder, toward the animals.

“Look at him,” Mónica said, and I squinted at this picture, at Nelson's smiling face. I compared this image with others I'd seen, with my own fragmented recollection of our one encounter, at the beginning of July the previous year; and suddenly, I had the strangest sensation, like double vision. For just an instant, I thought I saw myself standing just to the side of Francisco and Nelson, with another family—mine—and another set of siblings—my two sisters. An unlikely, but not impossible, coincidence. I stared at the image.

I also grew up in this city.

I was also once a brown-haired boy with thin legs and a bony chest.

I also went to the zoo. We all did.

It wasn't me hovering in the background of that old photograph, of course, but that's not the point. It could've been.

•   •   •

FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS
I've decided not to include the name of this town. I'll call it T——. I was born there, after all, and though I left when I was only three, I suppose this fact gives me some right to call it whatever I please. My parents brought my sisters and me to the city when I was very young, and I'm grateful that they did. I have no memories of our life before the move, though we children were regularly subjected to my father's long monologues on the town and its lore, so it always hovered before us, an idyllic mountain dreamscape, its perfection taunting us from afar. My father only wanted us to feel connected to the place, a sentiment I understand and appreciate now that I'm older, but at the time, those notions felt imposed, like a state religion. In my memory, these speeches are always interrupted by a car alarm or a power outage or the neighbor's overloud television set. Once in a great while the three of us children were packed onto a bus and forced to visit. We dreaded these trips, or pretended to, in order to spite our parents. We stared at our books, and refused to be impressed by the scenery. When the war closed off travel to the provinces, part of me felt relief. By the time the shooting stopped, there was no reason to travel anymore: nearly everyone my parents knew and loved had left the old town, and come to the city to start over, just as we had.

But the T—— of my memory, or my parents' memory, is not the same place as the one Diciembre encountered on their visit. In order to prepare this manuscript, I conducted interviews with Patalarga and Henry in the capital, long conversations from which I've already quoted, dialogues that veered forward and back in time. T——, though they were only there very briefly, appeared too: in shadow, as a backdrop for a series of events unfolding in strict adherence to the highlands' acute surrealist mode (a mere two thousand nine hundred meters above sea level, in case you were wondering). Henry and Patalarga both report that they felt happy to be free of the itinerary, to improvise once more as they had on those first epic Diciembre tours, when they were younger. But according to both men, Nelson was the most enthusiastic of them all, the most eager to get moving again. There was no further mention of Nelson's heartbreak, Ixta's pregnancy, or whatever his plans might be as a result. From the moment Henry had pointed to the spot on the map, Nelson was sold. He was fleeing. He wanted to put distance between him and the news that had left him so shaken.

“Yes,” Nelson said. “Let's get out of here.”

Only Patalarga voiced any reservations, mentioning casually their performance scheduled for the following evening. Henry was unmoved. “We'll cancel it.”

“Why can't we wait a day?”

Henry was far too anxious to explain. He pointed at Nelson instead. “Look at the boy. He's a wreck. We have to keep moving. This is how life is.”

“Don't do it for me,” Nelson protested.

Patalarga stared at Nelson, as if this last line had been uttered in a foreign language.

“He's not doing it for you,” Patalarga said. “He doesn't do things for you.”

Nelson looked to Henry for confirmation, and the playwright shrugged.

There was no mention of Rogelio, or of the prison. No mention of the real reasons Henry felt so drawn to this place he'd never visited before. Up until that point, Patalarga, Henry's best friend and confidant for more than two decades, had never heard the name Rogelio in his life.

I wondered: Did either Patalarga or Nelson ask for any further explanation from Henry?

“No,” the servant told me. “He was the president.”

They left San Jacinto the next morning. “Fuck you, Roosevelt!” Henry is reported to have shouted from the bus window as it pulled out of the station, though Patalarga was surely more diplomatic when he called to cancel their performance at the English language academy.

Once in T——, what Diciembre noticed first about the town was what anyone would notice, what I noticed every time I visited: the abundance of empty, shuttered houses, roughly half on any given block. Every building, with the exception of the municipal offices, needed a new coat of paint. The town was surrounded on all sides by yellow-green hills that seemed almost lush for this altitude, hills which were themselves dwarfed by jagged snowcapped peaks, so appropriately cinematic that they appeared to have been painted along the horizon by a set designer. If the town itself was notable only for its charming abandonment, the valley where it was placed was one of the loveliest they'd ever seen. That contrast—the spareness of the town and the majesty of its surroundings—made T—— seem even smaller and more insignificant than it was. Something similar might be said of many mountain villages, I suppose, but the sense was somehow sharper here, that feeling of isolation, the illusion of being outside time.

Like many settlements one comes across in the highlands, T—— was a village without men. Nelson, age twenty-three, Patalarga, forty, Henry, forty-six—Diciembre had essentially no contemporaries. I feel the same absence whenever I visit. There were children; there were elderly; and there were a handful of adolescent boys, who were, in many ways, a species apart: restless, unpleasant, wearing expressions Henry recognized them from his past. “They were like inmates hatching escape plans,” he told me. Rogelio had been one of them—that much was clear to Henry the moment he stepped off the bus from San Jacinto and saw the boys waiting in the plaza. They had a hunger in them, the same desire that had sent Rogelio to the city, pushing him along the accidental and luckless path that ended at Collectors prison, when he was only twenty-one.

Illiterate, hopeless, frightened. Far from home.

T——'s plaza was simple, relatively well tended, and picturesque: the two-story city hall stood on the east side, adorned with a fluttering flag; across from it was the stone cathedral, the oldest, and still the tallest, structure in the area, its empty niche filled once a year for the September festival of the town's patron saint. There were a few shops along the north end, businesses with spare, dusty shelves, whose doors opened and closed according to a schedule the actors of Diciembre never managed to comprehend. The hotel, called the Imperial, stood along the southern side of the plaza. It had three rooms, each with a couple of saggy twin beds. For Diciembre's stay, the owner brought in a third, crowding the room so completely that there was hardly any space to walk. The hotel also housed the town's only restaurant and its only bar, a pleasant balcony where I spent many evenings admiring the sleepy square. My favorite moment of each day came just after sunset, as daylight vanished behind the ridge to the west, and the plaza's four streetlamps came on. These tiny blooms of orange light warmed me somehow—they were so small, and the dark so immense. I liked to sit and watch them for long stretches, taking in the view of a plaza where nothing at all ever seemed to happen. I'll admit: the same oppressive calm I'd found maddening as a child had become almost charming.

But what does
nothing
look like?

A stooped elderly couple ambles by, casting soft shadows beneath these minuscule lights. They are trailed by their grandchildren, or a skinny dog; or perhaps they are alone, walking very close together to stay warm. The wind picks up, and later the moon begins to rise. Soon there will be stars dotting the sky. T—— is just like this, night after night—this quiet, this peaceful, this harmless. It was just like this when Nelson and Henry and Patalarga arrived. And it was probably just like this when Nelson was made to stay.

•   •   •

ROGELIO'S MOTHER
lived
four blocks from the plaza, on the west bank of the river that ran through town. Her home, I should mention, was across the street from the house where I was born. On those periodic trips back, I would sometimes see her, and she seemed ancient to me even then. About our house: it sat empty for more than two decades, until December 2000, when my parents finally tired of life in the capital. My sisters and I were grown, and my mother and father could be comfortable again in T——. Live quietly; cheaply, though with relatively few comforts. They sold the house in the city, and went home, to confront their nostalgia head-on. They were happy to be back, and encouraged us to visit often. My sisters had their families now, their partners and children a ready excuse. I was the youngest. Unattached. The pressure to go fell mostly on me.

“Come home,” my father would say when we spoke, though I had never really thought of T—— as home.

Regarding Rogelio's mother, my old man confessed to me: “I couldn't believe she was still alive.”

For Henry, the bus ride from San Jacinto was itself an act of bravery, a confrontation with a specific well of fear he'd avoided since the day he woke to the news that his old block in Collectors was burning down, with everyone inside. What is more frightening than our past? Than true love, snatched away? He wasn't fooled by the town's peaceful exterior. To him, T—— was vacant, a kind of still life, waiting to be animated by his presence. He'd hardly slept the night before, overwhelmed by the sense that a reckoning was imminent.

T—— was just as he imagined it would be, or like a museum of itself. Henry checked into the Imperial, and left immediately to look for his lover. He saw traces of Rogelio everywhere: a child has dragged a muddy set of fingers along the white stucco of an exterior wall; they extend nearly fifteen paces, in fading, vaguely parallel lines. Rogelio? Of course not, but still, the very idea filled Henry with expectation. He asked the occasional passerby for Rogelio's family home, and was met, more often than not, with blank stares. He couldn't remember Rogelio's surname; he wondered, in fact, whether he'd ever known it at all. Those he met were friendly enough, but most claimed ignorance, or gave him obscure directions that seemed designed to confuse. He entered a few of the open shops, and inquired there, with about as much luck. With every interaction, his anxiety rose, but he didn't give up. Finally, after a half hour of wandering, looking for a sign, he stopped an elderly woman in a purple shawl, hoping she might be Rogelio's mother. She seemed about the right age (though actually he had no idea), and in truth, that was the entirety of his logic. He all but babbled his story, or some version of it, to this startled stranger, who was surprisingly patient, nodding at Henry, as if urging him to go on. (Who this woman in the purple shawl might have been, I can't say with any certainty.) In any case, she wasn't kin to Rogelio, she said, but she knew him. And his family. And his mother, who—God bless!—was still alive.

“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.