Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

Everyone cheered, and this is when the tour finally seemed real to Nelson.

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED,Diciembre played in small towns and villages up and down the region, subject to weather like nothing Nelson had ever experienced. Some mornings it was as if the sun never rose, the skies swirling with blue and purple clouds until late afternoon, when they finally broke into a downpour. Other days, it wasn’t the rain but the winds one had to contend with: they blew fierce and merciless through the valley, leaving Nelson’s cheeks red and his body chilled. Then, quite unexpectedly, the cloud cover would vanish, and the sun would appear. Everything glistened, even the mountains, and he’d think: this is the most beautiful landscape I’ve ever seen. It never lasted; after an hour the clouds would return. Nelson lost weight in those first days, and woke up many mornings with a terrible headache. For breakfast he drank coca tea, ate cold bread and cheese. For lunch: fried trout, some eight days in a row. Ten days. Fourteen. Occasionally, guinea pig, a welcome change, but which too often involved the unpleasant ritual of having to choose your lunch from among a pen of furry little animals. (“The fat one,” said Henry, every time, without deigning to bend his head over the beasts.) They rode from one town to the next on a bus, if one was available; if not, and if there was no rain yet, the bed of a truck would do. They lay among piles of potatoes, gazing out across the valleys, the fields, the scattered, lonely houses, and the turbid sky that pressed down heavily on all of it. The higher they went, the more dangerous the roads became, at times barely wide enough for a horse cart; and Nelson would often peer over the edge of a crumbling mountain, and force himself to think of something other than death. His life back home came to mind, but Henry’s instructions — to give in completely to the world of the play, to forget everything else — seemed particularly apt since his last, disappointing conversation with Ixta. He strained to put her out of his mind.

In spite of these physical and psychological hardships, the tour had its pleasures: they were greeted warmly in each town, with a certain ceremony and solicitousness Nelson found charming; almost every night the audiences gave them a standing ovation that made all their efforts seem worthwhile. Even if the community had never heard of Diciembre, they were often grateful for the visit. The village elder or mayor would insist on hosting them himself; and being welcomed into these humble homes was, for Nelson, an astonishing privilege. He’d try to catch Henry’s eye or Patalarga’s, just to make sure they felt it too: the significance of these people’s unexpected, unearned trust. A party would be hastily organized, or spring up spontaneously after a performance. The villages might be just a handful of houses amid endless yellow-gray fields, but in many cases, these were the best audiences of all: no more than a dozen people altogether, with little education or experience with theater, a few farmers with ruddy faces, their long-suffering wives, and undernourished children, who’d approach Henry after the play, never looking directly at him, and say respectfully, “Thank you, Mr. President.”

There was the show in Corongo, where Patalarga’s elderly aunts and uncles lined up in the front row, his mother, beaming with pride, in the very center, an hour before the show was to begin. They sat quietly and very still, gazing upward as if posing for a photograph. When the performance began, their eyes narrowed in concentration, and when it was finished they stood to applaud. Afterward, they all ate potato and onion soup in the dining room of Patalarga’s childhood home, pressed together at a long narrow wooden table that creaked one way and then another, depending on whose elbow happened to be raised. The room was dark and musty, and all the windows and doors had been thrown open to air it out, letting in the nighttime chill, which no one but Nelson seemed to mind. Everyone was happy, proud, but they were tight-lipped and circumspect, as if contentment were an emotion to be guarded like a secret. Unlike the rest of the family, Patalarga’s mother was concerned. “I have a question,” she said to her son, as the meal was ending. “Oh, and please don’t take this the wrong way … but if you’re the one with the money, why must you play the servant?”

To which Henry responded, “The role comes so naturally to him. It would be a crime to use his talents in any other way.”

There was the night in the roadside community of Sihuas at three thousand two hundred meters above sea level, where they were given a corner of a bar called El Astral to perform; they waited and waited for an audience — anyone would do — but no one arrived. It was after ten in the evening, and besides the mustachioed bartender, and the manager at the hostel, they hadn’t seen another living soul anywhere in the vicinity. Henry and Patalarga each drank a beer in silence, unconcerned, or pretending to be, but Nelson was impatient. “They’re not coming,” he said, wishing only to rest. “No one’s coming!” But the bartender pulled at the edges of his mustache. “Believe me, young fellow, you just wait. You’ll do your show!”

A while later, he looked at his watch. “Go on. Go out there, you’ll see.”

Night had fallen; the sky was dark. Sihuas was set in a narrow slip of the valley, and Nelson saw nothing in the town’s empty streets, but when he got to the corner and looked up, there they were: strings of tiny, bobbing lamplights, hundreds of them, rushing down the trails. They were gold miners, descending the mountains all at once. A half hour later, in a clamor of shouting and noise, they arrived, and instantly, El Astral was overrun. The men were small and lean, with reddish, windburned cheeks, inky black eyes, and a feverish desire to drink. Some were scarred, or missing fingers from dynamite accidents, but they didn’t seem to care. They smelled of metal, and paid for their drinks with tiny bits of gold that glinted beneath the bar’s neon lights. They sang songs, and packed the place so tightly that Nelson, Patalarga, and Henry found themselves pushed together into a tight huddle. Their stage had disappeared beneath the crush of men. A half hour later, a bus full of prostitutes appeared — how? where had it come from? — and suddenly El Astral smelled of sex, or the possibility of sex, this thick cloud of painted women pushing into the bar as if borne by a strong and lurid wind.

There was no chance of doing the show now.

“No wonder the hostel manager wanted us all in a single,” Nelson said. He’d never been to a brothel before (though he’d imagined the setting enough to write a play about it), and now, quite improbably, the brothel had come to him. It was an impressive spectacle. Within the hour, there were couples having sex in the bathrooms, behind the remains of Diciembre’s makeshift stage, on the steps of the bus that had carried the women there. Henry settled their bill, suddenly embarrassed, apologizing for being unable to pay in gold, but the bartender was nothing if not understanding.

“Next time,” he said.

They walked the few blocks to the hostel together, the unlit streets of Sihuas alive with grunts and moans and women’s laughter.

And there was the night in Belén when they met the town’s much-aged former police chief, who, after a few drinks, agreed to share the story of how he’d briefly arrested some members of Diciembre nearly twenty years before. The old man had a chubby face and mottled skin, but his eyes shone at the memory: it was like he was watching a movie of the scene, admiring the version of himself played by a young and handsome actor. He’d made the papers in the capital, he recalled, something he’d never managed again. He told the story without reserve or shame, addressing Nelson directly, perhaps because he mistakenly believed that Henry and Patalarga were among the group that had been arrested. It was all right to laugh now, he said, but back then things were different. “We’d heard of the terrorists, but we had no idea what to look for. There were awful reports from the city, but no solid information. You probably don’t believe me, but we were frightened.”