Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

Henry was held without human contact in a mercifully clean, though still unpleasant, cell. It took him a few days to understand the severity of the situation. He was questioned about the people he knew, the plays he wrote, his travels around the country, and his motives; but it was all strangely lethargic, inefficient, as if the police were too bored by it all to decide his fate. He wasn’t beaten or tortured; he surely would’ve confessed to anything at the mere threat of such treatment. On the third day, still thinking, breathing, and living in the mode of a playwright, he asked for a pen and some paper in order to jot down notes about his tedious imprisonment, things to remember should he ever need to write about his experiences. He was denied, but even then, in his naiveté, he still wasn’t worried. Not truly concerned. Disappointed, yes, disturbed; but if he’d been asked, Henry would’ve said he expected to be released any day, at any moment. His captivity was so ridiculous to him, he could hardly conceive of it. He just couldn’t understand why they were so upset — had they seen The Idiot President ? It wasn’t even any good!

Just when he was beginning to despair, he was allowed to receive a visitor. This must have been the fifth or sixth day. By then a story had been concocted: the authorities categorically denied Patalarga’s version of the arrest, saying they found Henry hours later, drunk, wandering the streets of the Old City. They claimed to have held him for his own safety.

And why had they denied that Henry was in their custody for five days?

A bureaucratic mix-up. A record-keeping error.

And why were they still holding him?

It was under investigation. Henry was the prime suspect in the beating and false imprisonment of Patalarga. “Most likely a lover’s quarrel,” the police spokesman said, with a slyly raised eyebrow, “though I would prefer not to speculate.”

The docile press, however, speculated.

Henry’s older sister, Marta, appeared that fifth or sixth afternoon, representing the entire living world outside the small cell which held him — his family, his friends, Diciembre and its supporters. Everyone. It was a burden that showed clearly on her face. Her eyes were ringed with dark bluish circles, and her skin was sallow. She hadn’t eaten, Marta reported; in fact, no one in the family had stopped to eat or rest for five days, and they were doing everything they could to get him out. He imagined them all — his large, bickering extended family — coming together to complete this task: it would be easier to put them on shifts and have them dig a tunnel beneath the jail. The image made him smile. Marta was happy to see Henry hadn’t been abused, and they passed much of the hour talking about plans for after his release. She had two children, a daughter and a son, ages six and four, who’d both drawn him get-well cards, because they’d been told their uncle was at the hospital. Henry found this amusing; the fact that the cards had been confiscated at the door of the jail, he found maddening. Everyone assured the family not to worry, that they’d remember this little anecdote later, and laugh.

“Why wait?” Henry said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” his sister answered, but already she was suppressing a grin.

He was referring to a game they’d developed as children: forced, spontaneous, and meaningless laughter. They’d used it to get out of chores, dismissed from church. With hard work and diligence, they’d developed and perfected this skill: rolling around, cackling, rubbing their bellies like lunatics, before doctor’s appointments, or family trips, or on the morning of a school exam for which they had not prepared. Neither recalled the game’s origins, but they’d been punished for it together on many occasions, always feigning innocence. We can’t help it, they’d both say, laughing still, tears pressing from the corners of their eyes, until their protests landed them in weekly brother-sister sessions with a child psychologist. Even these many years later, both were proud that they’d never betrayed the other. In their prime, when they were as close as two human beings can be (Henry, age ten, Marta a couple of years older), the two of them could manufacture laughter instantly, hysterical fits that lasted for a quarter of an hour, or longer. Henry considered it his first accomplished dramatic work.

He insisted. “Why not?”

They’d been whispering until then, but now they took deep breaths, like divers preparing for a descent. The cell, it turned out, had good acoustics. The laughter was tentative at first, building slowly, but soon it was ringing through the jail. Unstoppable, joyful, cathartic. At the end of the block, the guards who heard it had quite a different interpretation: it was demonic, even frightening. No one had ever laughed in this jail, not like this. They felt panic. One of them rushed to see what was happening, and was surprised to find brother and sister laughing heartily, holding hands, their cheeks glistening.

The hour had passed.

Leaving the jail that afternoon, Marta gave a brief statement to the press, which was shown on the television news that evening. Her brother was completely innocent, she said; he was an artist, the finest playwright of his generation, and the authorities had interrupted him and his actors in the legitimate pursuit of their art. Those responsible should be ashamed of what they’d done.

The following day the charges of assault and false imprisonment were dropped, and replaced by other, more serious accusations. Henry was now being held for incitement and apology for terrorism. A new investigation was under way. He was given the news that morning by the same guard who’d come upon him and Marta laughing, who thankfully refrained from making the obvious statement about who might be laughing now, a small mercy which Henry nonetheless appreciated.

He was driven from the jail in the back of a windowless military van, with nothing to look at but the unsmiling face of a soldier, a stern man of about forty, who did not speak. Henry closed his eyes, and tried to follow the van’s twisting path through the city he’d called home since age fourteen. “We’re going to Collectors, aren’t we?” he asked the soldier, who answered with a nod.

On the morning of April 8, 1986, Henry entered the country’s most infamous prison. He wouldn’t leave until mid-November.

NELSON LIKED HEARINGthese stories; it was as if they filled in gaps in his knowledge he hadn’t known were there. He asked again and again: why haven’t you written about this? — but it was a question Henry never really answered convincingly. Every night in Collectors, friends paired off and walked circles around the prison yard, commiserating, confessing, doing all they could to imagine they were somewhere else. How do you set a play in a world that denies your characters any agency? Where do you begin? “Begin there!” Nelson would respond. “Or there! Or there!” (“Young writers believe everything constitutes a beginning,” Henry told me later, in a stern, professorial voice.) Undeterred, Nelson even offered to help: he would transcribe the scenes, or they could talk them out together. He could sketch the arc of each moment, write character treatments — they could collaborate . (“I never liked that word, to be quite honest,” Henry told me, noting its unfortunate political connotations.) Still, he pretended to be intrigued by the idea, that it was something worth considering, though he never committed to it. Perhaps, he told the eager young actor, when they returned.

Patalarga, who has the clearest memories of those days of the tour, says he sensed Nelson’s admiration for Henry becoming more nuanced: no longer the blind respect of a young artist, or the ambitious striving of a protégé who wants recognition, it had become something more like the appreciation of a son who’s come to understand his father as a man, with all the complexity that implies.