Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

He didn’t know how to respond, so when someone shouted, “He’s drunk!” Nelson felt relieved. The room roared with laughter, and then everyone sat.

The drinking began in earnest now, and a guitar soon appeared from a hidden corner of the room. It was passed from person to person, making a few laps around the circle before Tania finally kept it. Everyone cheered. She strummed a few chords, then cleared her throat, welcoming the visitors, thanking them all for listening. She sang in Quechua, picking a complex accompaniment, her agile fingers unrestrained by the cold. Nelson turned to Henry and asked him in a low voice what the song was about.

“About love,” he whispered, without taking his eyes off her. It seems they had briefly been involved two decades before. Seeing her, he told me later, unnerved him, filling him at once with regret and optimism. He felt then that he’d entered a gray period of his life, from which there was no easy escape. One could not enter the world of a play. One could not escape one’s life. Your bad choices clung to you. And even if such a thing were possible, it would require a strength of will he lacked, or a stroke of good fortune he didn’t deserve.

As for Nelson, the night wore on and he found himself appreciating Tania’s beauty with greater and greater clarity. Hours passed, and when he was finally succumbing to the cold and the liquor, Tania offered to lead him back to the hostel where they were staying. This was noted by the attendees with feigned alarm, but she ignored them. Outside in the frigid night, her eyes glowed like black stars. The town was small, and there was no possibility of getting lost. They trudged drunkenly through its streets, both wrapped in a blanket Aparicio had lent them.

“You sing beautifully,” Nelson said. “What was it about?”

“Just old songs.”

“Henry told me you were singing about love.”

She had a beautiful laugh: clear and unpretentious, like moonlight. “He doesn’t speak Quechua. Must have been a lucky guess.”

When they got to the door of the hostel, she asked Nelson if he was happy. She was curious, she said, because his face was so hard to read.

“Hard to read — is that a compliment?” Nelson asked.

“If you want.”

“Did you see the play?”

Tania nodded.

“And did you like it?”

“Yes,” she said. “Very much.”

“Then I’m happy.”

He moved to kiss her, but she dodged him, surprisingly alert, as if she were an athlete specially trained in dodging kisses. She patted him on the head, and they stood there awkwardly for a moment, until she smiled.

“It’s fine,” Tania said. “You’re sweet. You remind me of my son. Now, drink lots of water, and get as much rest as you can.”

Then she walked back to the party. Nelson watched her go; and though he was hundreds of kilometers away from home — in a place as different from the boardwalk of La Julieta as it might be from the surface of a distant planet — he recalled Ixta, who had stopped believing in his love, and had walked away from him. Every day Nelson waged a pitched battle against the memory of their conversation at the lighthouse, a brutal war, in which he was both victor and vanquished. In his mind he tried to change the outcome of this moment, like a magician attempting to bend a spoon through sheer concentration. No matter what he tried, it never worked. He recalled his silence now, that he’d let her go, and felt ashamed.

“Tania!” he shouted.

She turned, but said nothing. She was waiting.

“I love you!”

She laughed elatedly, as if it was the most wonderful joke she’d ever heard.

“He was a handsome boy,” Tania told me later. “If he were just a bit older, I would have taken him home with me.”

It was more than a month and a half into the tour by then; six weeks separated from his life, from his friends, from his dreams. Nelson had turned twenty-three the first week of May, without sharing the news with anyone. He was on his own. Henry had asked them all not to call home, not to write letters, but to immerse themselves in the moment. Now it was worth asking: What good was that advice, really? What did it achieve if the present was not new or different at all, but fundamentally the same: the usual traumas, only now set on a cold mountaintop, on a pitch-black night? Inside the hostel, the owner gave Nelson a large rubber bladder, swollen with boiling water, and as he prepared for bed, alone now, he held it in his hands. It was like holding a human heart, his own perhaps. He felt what remained of his contentment evaporating. He tried to go over his day: what had happened, or what, to his chagrin, had not. The cold made coherent thought nearly impossible, so Nelson lay down with the bladder pressed against his belly, curling himself around it like a snail. His eyes began to close. Was it worth it, he wondered: the travel, and the cold, and the distance, which felt, at times, like that exile Henry had clamored for that first day in the cab? What did it all amount to if he’d already ruined his life by letting Ixta walk away? Was he ruining his life even now?

He willed himself to rise, went down once more, where he woke the owner of the hostel, apologizing. Would it be possible to make a phone call, he asked her, to the capital?

The woman stood in her nightgown, observing the young actor through narrow, half-closed eyes. “There’s no telephone,” she said, suddenly upset. “You and your people always want a telephone, but I keep telling you!”

ONE AFTERNOON,Henry brought up the story of his imprisonment. He was talking to Nelson ostensibly, but naturally he was also talking to himself. In 1986, he was thirty-one years old, and the night of his arrest, his first concern had been for the play itself. His work was all that mattered. He didn’t notice the two men in dark suits hanging around after the show. They stood apart, talking to no one, leaning against the mildewed walls of the Olympic which, by hosting an experimental theater company like Diciembre, had officially entered a new, nearly terminal, stage in its long decline. (“We were there just before it went porno,” Patalarga told me.) The theater had emptied, the audience dispersed, and the actors were alone. One of the two men in dark suits approached. “You’re Henry Nuñez,” he said, as Henry made his way from behind the stage. It wasn’t a question. Henry wore a leather bag thrown over his shoulder, nothing inside but some smelly clothes and a few annotated scripts. He’d splashed water in his face, and argued with his cast of two, Patalarga and Diana, who weren’t even dating then. (“You must understand, my dear Alejito, this was back when Patalarga was still a virgin. Don’t laugh, he was barely twenty-five years old.”) The performance had been disappointing, and he’d told them so, in an angry tirade adorned with profanities. The small crew had gone. Diana had cursed him, called him “insensitive and tyrannical” before she fled as well. The theater was empty by then, just Henry and Patalarga, who was, at that moment, still backstage.

“Do you remember?” Henry said to his old friend, and Patalarga nodded.

Henry’s dissatisfaction turned to annoyance at the presence of these two strangers, who asked inane questions, when the entire theater universe of the capital knew he was Henry Nuñez. Who else, exactly, would he be?

When it became clear Henry wasn’t going to respond, one of the men said, “You’ll have to come with us.” He spoke formally, very deliberately; Henry frowned, and the other man repeated the drab, rather passionless command, this time emphasizing the words “have to.”

Patalarga emerged from behind the stage just then, quickly understood the situation (according to him), and tried to intercede; but by then a couple other men had materialized from the shadows of the Olympic; tough, unsmiling men, the sort who love settling arguments. They placed their giant hands on Henry. A few more words were spoken, some shouted, but in the end, this wasn’t a negotiation. They were taking the playwright, and that was that. When Patalarga wouldn’t shut up, they knocked him out and locked him in the ticket booth, where he would be found the following day by the custodian.