Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

By the time Nelson entered the Conservatory in 1995, the war had been over for a few years, but it was still a fresh memory. Much of the capital was being rebuilt. Perhaps it is more correct to say that the capital was being reimagined —as a version of itself where all that unpleasant recent history had never occurred. There were no statues to the dead, no streets renamed in their honor, no museum of historical memory. Rubble was cleared away, avenues widened, trees planted, new neighborhoods erected atop the ashes of those leveled in the conflict. Shopping malls were planned for every district of the capital, and the Old City — never an area with exact boundaries, but a commonly employed shorthand referring to the neglected and ruined center of town — was restored, block by block, with an optimistic eye toward a UNESCO World Heritage designation. Traffic was rerouted to make it more walkable, dreary facades given a dash of color, and the local pickpockets sent to work the outskirts by a suddenly vigilant police force. Tourists began to return, and the government, at least, was happy.

Meanwhile, Diciembre’s legend had only grown. Many of Nelson’s classmates at the Conservatory claimed to have been present at one or another of those historic performances as children. They said their parents had taken them; that they had witnessed unspeakable acts of depravity, an unholy union between recital and insurrection, sex and barbarism; that they remained, however many years later, unsettled, scarred, and even inspired by the memory. They were all liars. They were, in fact, studying to be liars. One imagines that students at the Conservatory these days speak of other things. That they are too young to remember how ordinary fear was during the anxious years. Perhaps they find it difficult to imagine a time when theater was improvised in response to terrifying headlines, when a line of dialogue delivered with a chilling sense of dread did not even require acting. But then, such are the narcotic effects of peace, and certainly no one wants to go backward.

Nearly a decade after the war’s nominal end, Diciembre still functioned as a loose grouping of actors who occasionally even put on a show, often in a private home, to which the audience came by invitation only. Paradoxically, now that travel outside the city was relatively safe, they hardly ever went to the interior. Was this laziness, a reasonable response to the end of hostilities, or simply middle age blunting the sharp edge of youthful radicalism? Henry Nuñez, once the star playwright of the troupe, all but withdrew from it, attributing the decision not to his time in prison but to the birth of his daughter. After his prison home was razed, almost in spite of himself, he fell in love, married, and had a daughter named Ana. And then: life, domesticity, responsibilities. Before Diciembre consumed him, he’d studied biology, enough to qualify for a teaching position at a supposedly progressive elementary school in the Cantonment. The work appealed to his ego — he could talk for hours about almost anything that came to mind and his students would not complain — and in his hands biology was less a science than an obsessive branch of the humanities. The world could, in fact, be explained, and he found it miraculous that the students listened. For extra money he drove a taxi every other weekend, crossing the city end to end in a serviceable old Chevrolet he’d inherited from his father. Though he hadn’t been inside a church since the mid-1980s, he put a bright red “Jesus Loves You” sticker in the front window to make potential passengers feel at ease. It was therapeutic, the mindlessness of driving, and the blank, sometimes dreary streets were so familiar they could not surprise him. On good days he could avoid thinking about his life.

Henry kept a giant plush teddy bear in the trunk, bringing it out for his daughter to sit with whenever he picked her up from her mother’s house. The bigger she grew, Henry told me, the more his ambition dulled. Not that he blamed her — quite the contrary. Ana, he explained, had saved him from a mediocre sort of life his old friends had suffered to attain: painters, actors, photographers, poets — collectively, they are known as artists, just as those men and women who train in spaceflight are known as astronauts, whether or not they have been to space. He preferred not to play the part, he said. He was done pretending, a conclusion he’d come to in the aftermath of his imprisonment, after his friends had been killed.

But in late 2000, some veterans of Diciembre decided it was important to commemorate the founding of the troupe. A series of shows was planned in the city, and a Diciembre veteran named Patalarga even suggested a tour. Naturally, they called on Henry, who, with some reluctance, agreed to participate, but only if a new actor could be found to join. Auditions for a touring version of The Idiot President were announced for February 2001, and Nelson, a year out of the Conservatory at the time, signed up eagerly. He and dozens of young actors just like him, more notable for their enthusiasm than for their talent, gathered in a damp school gymnasium in the district of Legon, reading lines that no one had said aloud in more than a decade. It was like stepping back in time, Henry thought, and this had been precisely his concern when the proposal was first floated. He sighed, perhaps too loudly; he felt old. Since his divorce, he saw eleven-year-old Ana on alternate weekends. His students were his daughter’s age; they completed science “experiments” where nothing at all was in play, where no possible outcome could surprise. Lately this depressed him profoundly, and he didn’t know why. Whenever Ana came to stay, she brought with her a bundle of drawings tied with a string, all the work she’d done since they’d last seen each other, which she turned over to her father with great ceremony, for critique. Unlike his old friends, unlike himself, his daughter was not pretending: she was an artist, in that honest way only children can be, and this fact filled Henry with immense pride. They would sit on his couch and discuss in detail her works of crayon and pencil and pastel. Color, composition, stroke, theme. Henry would put on his most elegant, most highfalutin accent, and describe her work with big words she didn’t understand but found delightful, funny, and very grown-up— poststructuralist, antediluvian, protosurrealist, aphasic . She’d smile; he’d rejoice. The anthropomorphic strain running through your oeuvre is simply remarkable! More often than not, hidden within his daughter’s artwork, Henry found a terse note from Ana’s mother, which was, in content and tone, the exact opposite of Ana’s lighthearted drawings: a list of things to do, reminders about Ana’s school fees, activities, appointments. Words free of warmth or affect or any trace of the life they had once attempted to make together. The playfulness would cease for a moment as Henry read.

“What does it say, Daddy?” Ana would ask.

“Your mother. She says she misses me.”

Henry and his daughter would dissolve into fits of deep-throated laughter. For a girl her age, Ana understood divorce quite well.

The revival of Henry’s most famous play was timed to coincide with the fifteenth anniversary of its truncated debut and the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the company. When he told Ana’s mother the idea, she congratulated him. “Maybe you can get locked up again,” his ex-wife said. “Perhaps it will resurrect your career.”

A similar notion had crossed his mind too, of course, but for the sake of his pride, Henry pretended to take offense.

Now, at the auditions, his career felt farther away than ever. Whatever this was — whether a vice, an obsession, a malady — it most certainly was not “a career.” Still, this dialogue, these lines he’d written so many years before, even when recited by these inexpert actors, provoked in Henry an unexpected rush of sentiment: memories of hope, anger, and righteousness. The high drama of those days, the sense of vertigo; he pressed his eyes closed. In prison, Rogelio had taught him how to place a metal coil in the carved-out grooves of a brick, and how to use this contraption to warm up his meals. Before that simple lesson everything Henry ate had been cold. The prison was a frightful place, the most terrifying he’d ever been. He’d tried his hardest to forget it, but if there was anything about those times that had the ability to make him shudder still, it was the cold: his stay in prison, the fear, his despair, reduced to a temperature. Cold food. Cold hands. Cold cement floors. He remembered now how these coils had glowed bright and red, how Rogelio’s smile did too, and was surprised that these images still moved him so.