At Night We Walk in Circles (15 page)

When Patalarga and Nelson appeared an hour later, Henry was halfway through his third beer. He wasn't exactly happy to see them, and would've preferred to be alone for a while longer. Still, he stood to greet his friends, and when he did, his glass tipped over. No one moved to catch it. The three of them watched it roll slowly and stop at the edge, while the beer spread over the surface of the table and then tumbled over in a long thin line.

“Graceful,” said Patalarga.

Henry righted the glass, shook his fingers dry, and called for a towel.

“Leave it,” the owner shouted from across the bar.

Henry wiped his hands on his jeans. It was midafternoon; the sun was high. The entire valley was bathed in light, and the streets of T—— looked like an unused stage set. It all gave him a headache.

“Well, what is it?” Henry said.

Nelson was fully recovered, or seemed so. He beamed with satisfaction. “We have a show tonight. The mayor is going to open up the auditorium for us.”

“Tonight?”

Patalarga frowned. “Yes, tonight. This is good news, Henry.”

“It was,” he answered. “Two hours ago it was great news. But I'm not sure it's so good now.”

Nelson and Patalarga waited for an explanation, but Henry had no idea where to begin. If he were just quiet long enough, he thought, maybe they could avoid the show altogether. His friends stared.

Finally he relented. “I went to see the family of an old friend of mine who died in Collectors.”

“Okay,” said Patalarga.

“That's why we're here. Why we came. But my friend's family, his mother, his sister—they had no idea he was dead. I upset them. They accused me of lying. They threw me out.”

“They threw you out?” Nelson asked.

“Sort of.”

The three friends were quiet for a moment.

Nelson seemed unconvinced. “And?”

It seemed so simple to Henry, so obvious.

“And I feel bad.”

Nelson laughed in spite of himself, and turned to Patalarga. “He feels bad?”

Patalarga didn't answer, just shook his head and turned away.

“I don't expect you to understand,” Henry said.

Nelson glared. “Why's that exactly? What don't I understand?”

“That I can't do the show.”

“You're canceling?”

“Henry, you can't cancel,” Patalarga said.

Henry crossed his arms over his chest. “I am. I just did.”

What happened next surprised them all: Nelson pushed Henry with two hands, sending the playwright tumbling backward. One of the chairs tipped over with a crash, and the empty beer glass toppled over once more, this time landing on the floor.

Nelson stood over Henry, his face red with fury. Perhaps he was a fighter, after all.

Patalarga forced his way between them, as best he could, trying to calm Nelson down. It wasn't easy. “What's wrong with you? Why did you bring us here?” Nelson shouted. “What do you want from us?”

“I'd never seen him like that,” Patalarga told me later.

He managed to push Nelson back, enough for Henry to get to his feet. The playwright stood, straightened his shirt, and raised a hand to the startled owner. Then he faced Nelson, glaring. He took a deep breath. There was some swagger to him.

“Patalarga,” he said. “Did I deserve that?”

“Honestly?”

Henry nodded.

“Yes.”

Henry looked puzzled for a moment, then deflated. That flash of vigor vanished as quickly as it had come; he considered his friends, the empty veranda, the plaza before them, and felt small.

“You're wondering why,” Nelson said, still scowling. “I'll tell you. You're being selfish. For a change.”

Henry slumped into a chair. “Is it true?” he asked Patalarga, with searching eyes.

Patalarga nodded.

Henry rubbed his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “You win. We'll do it.”

•   •   •

AT ROGELIO'S CHILDHOOD HOME,
the situation was deteriorating, and Noelia had begun to worry. This was the story these two women had been told, the story they knew: their beloved Rogelio had gone first to the city for work, then immigrated to the United States in 1984 at age twenty-one. Jaime told them all this, in broad strokes, with just enough detail to seem true. Rogelio had braved border crossings and skirted civil wars in Central America, negotiated Mexico by bus, and passed into the United States through a tunnel in Nogales. Eventually he made it to the city of Los Angeles. As far as they knew, that's where he remained; and he hadn't returned to visit only because he had no papers. Jaime claimed to speak to him roughly once a year, and they believed him. Noelia had never doubted it; and as for Mrs. Anabel, she held on to the idea with fierce resolve. Every year for her younger son's birthday, she'd baked him a cake.

If Mrs. Anabel's gullibility on this count seems far-fetched, remember this was T——: the rows of padlocked houses are all the context one needs. In another place it might strain credulity, but here nothing could be more normal than Rogelio disappearing for seventeen years, and still being thought of as
alive
. My father still speaks warmly of people he hasn't seen or heard from in forty-five years, and by the tone of his voice you might expect them to appear tomorrow and renew their unbreakable friendship. Time means something very different in a place like T——. As does distance. As does memory. Almost every family had a son who'd gone off into the world. Some sent money; some vanished without a trace. Until proof to the contrary was offered, they were all to be thought of as living. It was the town's unspoken credo.

The truth about Rogelio's fate, the story Henry shared, had upset this balance. Mrs. Anabel was the most affected, naturally; even on a good day, dementia made her subject to mood swings she was unable to control. But that afternoon, the very thought of Rogelio dead threw her into a panic, and not long after Henry had gone, she was weeping with rage and helplessness.

“She kept calling for Rogelio, for her baby,” Noelia told me later. “I didn't know what to do. If he was dead, why had no one told her? Shouldn't a mother always know these things? Why had no one told
me
?”

A few minutes before three, she managed to give her mother a sedative and coax her back to bed. This was not easy. She deflected all questions about Rogelio until the old woman was asleep, then Noelia pried open the door to the street and hurried into town. If Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson had not been caught up in their own discussion, they might have seen her rushing across the plaza, one hand clutching the hem of her skirt so as not to drag its edge across the cobblestones.

It was a little after three in the afternoon when she finally got her brother Jaime on the line. She tried to explain it as best she could, but she herself didn't quite understand what had happened, why this stranger had appeared out of nowhere, talking about their Rogelio. Jaime didn't seem to get it either, or pretended not to, and finally Noelia lost her patience. She changed tacks, stopped trying to explain.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

The sound of her own voice startled her. Her hands were shaking. She hadn't shouted in years.

On the other end of the line, there was silence. Then: “About what?”

“About Rogelio,” she said.

She could hear Jaime's long sigh. “Does Mama know?”

“She's in terrible shape.”

“I'm on my way,” he said. A moment later he'd hung up.

Jaime got in his car and arrived by early evening, just as the yellow lights in the plaza were flickering to life, and just as Diciembre was preparing to go onstage before a few dozen audience members in the municipal auditorium. Nelson had won the argument, perhaps the first time in the history of Diciembre that Henry had lost one.

It was June 12, 2001. As it turned out, this would be the troupe's last show together. Though they didn't know it yet, Diciembre's first tour in fifteen years was over.

THE PREPARATIONS
for
Diciembre's performance in T—— began around five, when the mayor's deputy, a cheerful high school student in his last year, unlocked the municipal auditorium. The deputy's name was Eric. He was young and fresh-faced, and he'd be leaving T—— within a few months.

“This is it!” he said brightly.

“This is it,” repeated Nelson, whistling a long, fading note to himself. He dropped his end of the heavy duffel bag, and considered the space before him.

The auditorium was one of the town's newer buildings, a charmless and impractical metal box that stayed cold in the rainy season and hot in the dry. It had been underutilized for years, suffering from a neglect that reminded Diciembre of their spiritual home, the Olympic. Eric left them just inside the door, and slid along the wall to the raised stage. There, he disappeared behind a curtain and began to turn on the lights, first one row, then another, then a few at once, and so on. Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson stood with arms crossed, watching the fluorescent tubes above hum on and now off, in various combinations. None cast a particularly pleasing light on the dank space, but the young man finally settled on the arrangement that was the least offensive.

“How's this?” he called out from behind the curtain.

Henry held his hands out in front of him, fingers spread. His white presidential gloves were a grayish yellow.

“It's terrific,” said Patalarga.

They carried their things backstage, and began to unpack and then change, each man floating to different corners of the dressing area, hardly speaking. Henry was brooding; Nelson seemed distracted; Patalarga fretted about his costume. Somehow his clothes didn't feel right, he said to no one in particular. Had they shrunk, or had he put on weight? There was no mirror, so they had to rely on each other, which might have worked if they'd been in a different collective mood. But they weren't. The three of them dressed sloppily, and scarcely spoke. At six-thirty, Henry convened a brief meeting to go over some rough spots in the play, but this was entirely unnecessary, of course. What rough spots was he referring to exactly? What surprises could the performance hold at this point? Still, Nelson and Patalarga listened to Henry's rambling instructions out of respect and a sense of duty. He might have gone on longer, but soon the people began shuffling in, and the three men fell into a reverent silence. It's a sound every actor loves, and, in a sense, lives for: the murmur of a crowd, the patter of feet, hum of strange voices. You perk up in excitement, anticipation. You begin to imagine who your audience will be, what they will look like. Before you ever cast eyes on them, they are real people. Before you ever see them, you are connected.

Around seven-fifteen, Eric appeared again. He poked his head behind the curtain and announced it was about time to begin.

“How many are out there?” asked Henry.

“Thirty or so,” the young man said. “Thirty-five, I'd guess.”

Henry shook his head. “Don't guess. Go back and count them.”

Eric bowed his head, and returned a few moments later with downcast eyes. “Twenty-five. I'm sorry. But there may be more coming.”

Patalarga grinned, and thanked the boy. Eric's disappointment was touching. He'd played for audiences far smaller. “We'll begin in a minute.”

Eric nodded, and just as he was turning to go, Henry stopped him.

“Just one more question,” the playwright said. “Do you know everyone in this town?”

“Just about.”

“Good. So, is Noelia out there? Or her mother, Mrs. Anabel? Do you know who I'm talking about?”

The young man looked confused. “Yes. Why?”

“They're old friends,” said Nelson. Until that moment, you wouldn't have guessed he was listening at all. He and Henry locked eyes.

Eric nodded, as if he understood. “Well, Mrs. Anabel doesn't really leave the house much.”

“So she's not here?”

“I haven't seen her. Not Noelia either.”

Henry thanked him, and the deputy disappeared on the other side of the curtain.

“Are you expecting them?” Patalarga asked. “Do you want them to come?”

“I don't know.” Henry looked genuinely puzzled. “I really don't know.”

A few moments later, the curtains parted, and the show began.

•   •   •

THE DRIVE
from San Jacinto to T—— is roughly four hours. You can shave a little off that, but not much. The road is narrow and the consequences of misjudging a turn in the high mountains are fatal. Still, Jaime made good time. Of the protagonists in these events, he's one of the few that has refused to speak to me, but I can imagine what he was thinking as he drove along those narrow, twisting roads. He was thinking of his brother, Rogelio, and the facts of his death. Whether Rogelio was angry when he died, or scared. Whether Rogelio blamed him, or felt abandoned. He was thinking how often he'd made this trip, and how it never changed. The scale of the mountains. The smallness of everything else. He'd known about Rogelio's death all along, and kept his younger brother's imprisonment a secret, just as he kept the nature of his business a secret. This was easier than you might expect. In T——, the riot and subsequent massacre at Collectors had never made much of an impact.

Jaime arrived around the time Diciembre was coming out onstage. At this point, the story of that night moves along parallel tracks: Patalarga appears beneath the pallid yellow lights, before a small but expectant crowd. He opens with a monologue about loneliness, delivered on this particular night with greater feeling than ever. The mayor's young deputy stands at the auditorium's back wall, wearing a dark suit and watching the proceedings with relish. He reports that the crowd was entranced. (“We'd never had a theater company in town before,” he told me later.) At the same time, Jaime rushes to the home where he was raised, embraces his sister, and hurries behind her to their mother's room. Brother and sister stand in the doorway and watch their mother sleep, listening for her shallow breaths. Without exchanging a word, they marvel at her fragility, the way one might contemplate a newborn. Jaime steps forward, to her bedside, and places a palm on his mother's forehead. He strokes her hair.

“She was very upset?” he asks Noelia.

His sister answers with a nod.

By the time Henry steps out onto the stage, looking slightly less presidential than usual—by then, Jaime and his sister, Noelia, are sitting in the living room, going over the details of a very well-kept family secret. Not much is said about Rogelio's unfortunate arrest. Collectors is described in shorthand—hell, Jaime says. And everything after that can be reduced to a single sentence. Their little brother was dead. He'd been dead so long now it felt almost dishonest to mourn him.

All afternoon, since Henry's visit, Noelia had known it was true. She'd known it as she put her frantic mother to bed, as she raced across the plaza, as she waited for her brother to arrive. A stranger does not appear and announce a death by mistake. Very few people are cruel in this way, and Henry had not struck her as cruel. He'd looked at the photo of Rogelio and claimed not to know him—and it was this act of mercy which made her like him, in spite of everything. It was also the moment that had confirmed his story.

For an actor, this man was not a good liar.

“Why didn't you tell me?” she asked her brother, the one she still had left.

But Jaime didn't answer. He wanted to know one thing. “Who told you? Who was this person?”

“He said his name was Henry,” Noelia answered.

“And where is he?”

“At the auditorium. They told me in town he was in a play tonight.”

“A play?” Jaime frowned. There was a moment of silence, and then: “I'm going to kill him. I'm going to kill that faggot motherfucker.”

Noelia looked up. There was hatred in his eyes. She understood then that her brother knew this stranger, this Henry. And it frightened her. She began to cry. Her brother watched her without speaking. He didn't reach out to her, and Noelia attempted to cry quietly, so as not to disturb him.

They spent many minutes like this, but by a quarter to eight, Jaime was unclenching his jaw, drawing his creaky wooden chair closer to his sister, and telling her he was sorry. These were not words he said every day. She bowed her head, wiped her tears, and accepted his apology.

“What will we tell mother?” she said.

“Nothing,” Jaime answered. “We won't be telling her a goddamn thing.”

They left shortly after, closing the door carefully so as not to wake Mrs. Anabel. It was a cold night, and the quarter moon was just beginning to rise above the edge of the mountains. By the time they passed through the doors of the municipal auditorium, Diciembre had come to my favorite scene in
The Idiot President
. In it, the president is having his correspondence read aloud. The letters come from the country's citizens, and they all begin with a long list of fairly standard honorifics: Your Highness, Your Honor, Your Benevolence. The president listens (or pretends to listen) to the appeals—pleas for work, for relief, for mercy, for land, for refuge—but he is unmoved. His posture is regal, his bearing severe. “Statuesque,” says the note in the script. Alejo, Nelson's character, the idiot son, and Patalarga's, the servant, take turns reading one letter each, while the president files his nails and brushes his hair. Over the course of the scene, a kind of competition arises between the son and the servant. Who can read better? Who can make this routine act more pleasing and more interesting to the president? Henry's character, naturally, doesn't notice at all, or pretends not to notice, but we do: the idiot son and the servant shoot each other angry, jealous looks and begin to read over each other, interrupting. The lists of honorifics preceding each letter becomes longer, and more ridiculous, until it's clear that Alejo and the servant are simply making them up. Their voices grow louder, and the increasingly bizarre titles are delivered rapid-fire—

“To our dear leader, personification of the nation's purest desires!

To the bright sun of liberty, most high and most alarming!

To the most chaste and supreme one, munificent, magnificent, and beneficent!”

—words tumbling out and overlapping, until it's just a jumble, no longer discernible words but only noise.

“They watched the whole scene without sitting,” Eric told me. “I noticed them because Henry had asked me about Noelia.”

What were they thinking?

Or more specifically, what was Jaime thinking?

Though he'd lived in San Jacinto for more than two decades, Rogelio's older brother was a well-known figure in town. He'd done well for himself, made money—and nothing earned the people's respect like money. That night of the play in T——, he stood beside his sister with his arms crossed, squinting at the stage, staring intently at Henry. He hadn't seen the playwright in fifteen years, but he knew it was him. He had no trouble recognizing that face, those gestures, that posture.

According to Henry, they'd met only once, in Collectors, a scene I imagine Jaime was playing over in his mind. A winter's day in 1986, in the yard of Block Seven. Jaime had come from San Jacinto to see his brother. He spent a few hours with Rogelio, strolling up and down the yard. Seen from a distance, they were like fish caught in a current, Rogelio and Jaime and all the others. Henry had been watching them all afternoon. Then visitors' hours were almost over, and as the two brothers were saying their good-byes, Henry couldn't resist any longer. “I'm not sure why or how,” he told me later, “it just came out.” Perhaps he was hurt that he hadn't been introduced, though he found that hard to admit. He barreled toward them now, furious, protective, jealous, catching both brothers by surprise.

This is what he said to Jaime that afternoon in 1986, in a voice far too loud for Collectors:

“You need to take better care of your brother.”

Jaime frowned. “I'm sorry?”

“You owe him that. I know what you do.”

“Who's this?” Jaime asked his brother.

“No one,” said Rogelio.

There was no time for that betrayal to sting. Henry had already gone too far. “It doesn't matter who I am. I know who you are. You're the reason he's in here.”

Jaime glared at this stranger. To his brother, he said, “Get this idiot away from me.”

“That's enough, Henry.”

It was more than enough, but he couldn't stop. He was shouting now: “You have the money. I know what you do!”

Jaime shook his head, then he threw a punch at Henry, landing it on his jaw. Henry staggered and fell. Jaime threw an arm around Rogelio, and together they walked to the gate of Block Seven. Jaime never visited Collectors again. Rogelio didn't speak to Henry for three days.

Now, onstage at T——'s municipal auditorium, the president accepted tribute from his son and his servant. As the scene devolved into noise, Jaime and Noelia found a place to sit.

“Who is he?” Noelia whispered to her older brother, but Jaime didn't respond.

For Noelia, the next forty minutes were something of a revelation. She'd never seen a play before, except the ones the schoolchildren put on every spring to commemorate the founding of the town. This particular play wasn't necessarily easy to follow, and as the scenes barreled toward their conclusion, she began to wonder about the young lead. He was handsome, she thought, and it occurred to her he was the same age as Rogelio had been the last time she saw him. That was all. It was an idle thought. They didn't look alike; it's just that Nelson was an odd sight in a place like T——. He was a young man in his twenties with a drifting gaze and bad posture. He looked lost, and perhaps this is why she thought of her missing, suddenly dead, brother.