Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

Initially, when Ixta and I spoke, she was reticent, loath to recall these early days with Nelson. I can understand, of course.

“What’s the use?” she said. “It isn’t easy, you know?”

I could tell by looking at her that she was telling the truth: it wasn’t easy. But I insisted; and once she warmed to the task, the stories flowed. A couple of times she laughed so hard she even asked me to stop the recording. I didn’t, only pretended to. “He was sweet,” Ixta said. “And in the early days, he adored me. I’m not making this up — he told me all the time. I fell for him, completely.”

“Did you discuss the possibility that he might leave?”

“Some, but only in the vaguest way. I knew all about the visa. About Francisco. He bragged to others that he was leaving soon, but I never took it very seriously. His papers came not long after we’d started seeing each other, and I didn’t feel threatened. He got really excited, and I did too. We even talked about going together, to New York or Los Angeles, or somewhere. I was working with his mother all this time, you know, and she supported the idea. It was only after Sebastián died that things changed.”

“Is that when you broke up?”

“No,” Ixta said. “I’d met him maybe eight months before. And we stayed together for another two years, almost. But yeah, something shifted then. It was the end of our honeymoon. He loved his father. I did too. Sebastián was a wonderful man. Nelson didn’t talk about leaving anymore. And neither did I.”

She didn’t want to say much about the breakup, so I asked instead about Diciembre. She chortled. “Nelson was obsessed. He loved them, their history, and his admiration for Henry Nuñez was really something. You’ve got to understand, this is not a universally recognized playwright or anything. Diciembre has some cachet at the Conservatory, but really, this was a private obsession. I read some of the old plays, you know. Nelson made me photocopies. He’d be so eager to hear my opinion, it was like he’d written them himself.”

“And?” I said.

Ixta smiled politely. “I’ll admit I never understood what the big deal was.”

HENRY CAMEto rehearsal one Thursday afternoon with a stack of his daughter’s drawings, which he dropped in Nelson’s lap, without explanation. He stood, arms akimbo, while Nelson flipped casually through the pictures, not sensing the urgency in his director’s pose. They were drawings of boats and rainbows and horses.

“Thank you,” Nelson said. “They’re lovely.” Only then did he notice Henry’s expression.

Because of the slope of the floor, Henry wasn’t much higher than eye level, and the stage behind him seemed immense. They were in the old Olympic, which in just a few weeks had come to feel like a home to them, its unique patterns of decay becoming familiar, even comforting. They were rehearsing every Monday and Wednesday night, Thursday afternoons, and all day Saturday. Sometimes other members of Diciembre came to watch, offer advice, but mostly Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson were alone. Once on tour, they would play in churches, garages, fields, plazas, fairgrounds, and workshops. One show would be performed beneath the blinking fluorescent lights of a nearly frozen municipal auditorium; another on the hosed-down killing floor of a slaughterhouse — but none in a proper theater, if a place like the fire-damaged Olympic could still be called as much. Henry and Patalarga were aware of this. Neither thought to tell Nelson; both assumed he just knew.

Now, it appeared the playwright had something on his mind.

“You want me,” Henry said ( bellowed , according to Patalarga), “to spend a month or two away from this delicate, budding artist, this daughter I adore, the only person I love in this world, so I can accompany you while you fuck up my play? Is that what you’re saying?”

Nelson had not, to his knowledge, been saying that. He’d thought things had been going well. He stammered a defense, but Henry cut him off.

From across the theater, Patalarga watched. He told me later that he’d been expecting a scene like this for at least a few days before it happened. Nelson was not, in Patalarga’s words, “fully submitting to the world of the idiot.” There was only one way to satisfy Henry, and that was total immersion. Patalarga recalled an experimental piece from the early 1980s, a play about an imaginary slum built atop the remains of an indigenous graveyard. It was a dark, caustic three-act piece full of ghosts, and in the lead-up to opening night, Henry had a dozen doll-sized caskets built for his cast. He asked every actor to sleep with one of these tiny coffins beside him in bed, so they might better understand the emotion sustaining the work.

So, upon seeing Henry descend on Nelson this way, Patalarga chose to keep his distance “out of respect for the artistic process.”

Nelson, after an initial moment of protest, fell silent, staring back at his tormentor, bewildered. He was not unaccustomed to this sort of treatment, in fact. His face went flat, expressionless, calm. It was a trick Nelson knew from childhood, from waging battles with his brother that he knew he couldn’t win. It wasn’t stoicism or deference or indifference; it was all those things.

Nelson deflected Henry’s vitriol with a few phrases from his past. They came forth with surprising ease: “I’m sorry you feel that way.” “What can I do to make you more comfortable?” “Is it something I’ve done?” “What would you like to get out of this conversation?”

It wasn’t long before Henry’s energy petered out. He gave up, slumping into a seat a few rows behind Nelson, spent. A few long minutes of silence passed, not a sound in the theater but those that emerged from the neighborhood outside: a revving motor, a distant horn, a few bars of music from a passing street vendor.

“You remind me of my ex-wife,” Henry said finally. “I’ll be needing a drink now.”

“I’m sorry, but—”

“It’s fine. I shouldn’t have yelled. Come here.”

Nelson stood, and walked a few rows back. What hadn’t he done for the play? What wasn’t he willing to do?

“I don’t know what’s going on with me,” Henry said. He’d been having these swells of anger, righteousness, he explained, explosive moments that were catching him increasingly unawares.

“It’s just part of the process,” Nelson offered, unknowingly echoing Patalarga’s interpretation.

Henry didn’t buy it. “I haven’t done this in more than ten years. I don’t have a process.”

Nelson shrugged, and handed over Ana’s drawings. On top: a pastoral scene done in finger paint, a family of thumbprints adorned with dots for eyes and wide smiles, bounding about a prairie, or perhaps a city park. It was difficult to say. The sky was smeared across the top of the page in its traditional blue — here, in a city that suffers beneath thick gray clouds for ten months out of the year. Why do local children insist on coloring it this way? Is it simplicity? Wishful thinking? Nelson felt certain he’d done the same when he was Ana’s age. Did the sky-blue sky reflect a lack of imagination, or an excess of the same?

Henry took the pictures without comment, and leaned down to put them in his shoulder bag. “Sit,” he said to Nelson, gesturing to the seat beside him. His voice was calm now. “Look at that stage. Imagine this theater full of people. They don’t know you or me or a thing about the play. Maybe they’ve never been to a play before. They aren’t your friends. They’ve come to be entertained. Edified. Comforted. Distracted. Can you see it?”

“Yes.”

“The lights dim. The curtain opens. Who comes out first?”

“Patalarga,” Nelson said.