Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

What did Nelson tell them?

Concretely: about Ixta. How she’d walked away, how he’d let her. How his world was poorer without her. Blank. What he told them that night at the Wembley wasn’t true: he’d always wanted to leave, and he hated his brother for keeping him here. He even wanted to go now, and take Ixta with him. To start again. To try. This was what he’d realized on the tour. What he’d learned. He told them much more, Patalarga said to me later, many things which seemed to combine into a large, cosmic sort of complaint: a sadness pouring out of Nelson that began with losing Ixta, perhaps forever, but went much further. He was being condemned to a life he didn’t want. It scared him.

“Naturally,” Henry told me, “this was a feeling I knew firsthand.”

“Did you offer to cut the tour short?” I asked.

The playwright shook his head. “That wouldn’t have solved anything.”

“So what did you do?”

“We told him to call her — what else? He loved her, and he knew he’d made a mistake. Talking to us about it wasn’t going to help. We left the restaurant, and walked until we found a call center. It was across the street from a park, so we found a bench and said we’d wait for him there. When Nelson came out, he looked dazed.”

I told Ixta about this later: I thought she might want to hear that description, might find it illuminating to know the impact their conversation had on Nelson. It was the complement to what she’d been feeling at the beginning of the tour. That everything he’d said on the phone to her that night was true: he did miss her fiercely. He had found time to think. He did have a plan now, however vague, and it did include them both. A future existed, and it could be theirs. He loved her.

She nodded as I spoke, betraying little curiosity at first, until a moment when I thought I saw a tear gathering in the corner of her eye. It didn’t last long. She was nothing if not composed, and an instant later, she’d brushed the tear away with the back of her hand. She cleared her throat and cut me off.

“You don’t have to tell me this. I know.”

She remembered Nelson’s phone call very well, in fact: though the connection from San Jacinto was snowy with static, his voice was clear enough. He was at a call center, he told her, and the town was coming to life for the evening. It was around nine, and the streets were thick with people. Lovers. Thieves. There were moto taxis whirring by, and packs of little boys huffing glue in the nighttime chill.

“It sounds lovely,” Ixta said. “Did you call to tell me about San Jacinto?”

Silence for a moment. Then: “No.”

“I should have stopped him,” she told me. “I shouldn’t have let him say anything. I already knew it didn’t matter.”

But she couldn’t help it; she let him talk. It was painful to hear, Ixta admitted, and she was not unmoved.

When he’d finished, she told him her news.

“Do you think that had anything to do with what happened next?” I asked.

Ixta gave me a blank look. She was very careful with her words: “I think Mr. Nuñez and his associate are the ones who should answer that. I wasn’t there.”

I bent my head, pretending to look over my notes, but all the while, I could feel Ixta staring at me.

“You know,” she added, “I don’t see why any of this matters now.”

“It still matters to me,” I said, though if she’d asked me why I’m not sure how I would have responded.

Just then her baby called out from the other room. Ixta excused herself to attend to the child, and I sat in her living room, wondering if I should gather my things and go. I didn’t. She came back a few minutes later with her little girl, wrapped in a pale yellow blanket.

“What’s her name?”

“Nadia,” Ixta said, and at the sound of her mother’s voice, the infant’s round green eyes popped open. “I’m here, baby,” Ixta purred, and Nadia breathed again, sleepy. She spread her mouth into a cavernous yawn, as if trying to swallow the world, and then her eyes closed again; her face became small and peaceful.

“She’s beautiful,” I said.

Ixta nodded. “You can see for yourself she looks nothing like him.”

NELSON’S MOTHER ALSO RECEIVEDa phone call that night, but whether it was before or after the conversation with Ixta is not known. Mónica doesn’t remember hearing anguish or heartbreak in his voice, but then again, she reminded me, her younger son was an actor, a boy who’d kept more than his share of secrets over the years. There’s another possibility: that she was so surprised and happy to have Nelson on the line, she simply overlooked any hints about his emotional state. In any case, Mónica is certain he didn’t mention Ixta — in fact, he hadn’t mentioned her for many months. It was as if this girl disappeared from his life. Mónica had liked Ixta well enough, and even felt responsible, indirectly, for the pairing, but Nelson was young, and these things happen. The heart mends. Life is long. When I told Mónica that they were still seeing each other, more or less, up until the date of Nelson’s departure, she was surprised.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Really?”

That night, Nelson and his mother spoke in very broad terms about the tour, about how he was getting along with his fellow actors. Nelson claimed to have learned a lot about his craft, and assured her he was enjoying being away. (Perhaps he had called his mother first.) He said he’d been thinking about his future.

“What have you been thinking?” Mónica asked her son.

He sighed. “That I should go, finally.”

Nelson’s mother didn’t need this to be explained. She knew what “go” meant, understood the implicit destination. Nor did she disagree, really. “The tour was giving him perspective,” she told me, “and that was a good thing. Sebastián and I pushed him to leave for years, but after my husband died, all that was put on hold. I wondered if it was my fault, but Nelson never said anything. I should have kept pushing him, but the truth is, I was too tired. It was selfish, but I needed him.”

“What did you tell him that night?” I asked.

“That I supported him, no matter what he wanted to do. You know, the original plan was New York or California, but even San Jacinto was a step. For years, he’d never left the city. After Sebastián passed, he stayed by my side. His friends went on vacation, they piled in cars and went on camping trips down the coast. And he hardly ever went with them. And yes, maybe he resented me for it. So now, in a way, I was happy to hear him say he wanted to leave. I’d been waiting for it.”

About the tour, Nelson told his mother the play was “a hit”—though he qualified this by saying that the word meant something different out there in the provinces. He laughed then, and Mónica recalls how beautiful her son’s laughter sounded to her. Nelson explained that successful shows might be performed before fifteen or twenty spectators, in ad hoc venues where the very concept of “a full house” didn’t apply. How, for example, does one “sell out” a windswept field at the edge of town? If every known resident is there, huddled together for warmth in the limitless space? If the tickets themselves cost nothing, does it even matter? If a few of the audience members raise their hands to ask questions in the middle of a performance — is this a good thing? And if you pause in the middle of a scene to answer these questions (as Henry had one strange night, “a presidential press conference,” he called it) is that really winning theater?

“Yes,” Mónica recalls saying. She was enthusiastic: “It is!”

She was not an old woman, not yet, but the last two months hadn’t been easy. She spent hours each day “tidying up”—this was the phrase she used, though it sounded more to me like a kind of archaeology, or an intensely personal subspecialty of that discipline: exploring one’s own solitude, as if it were a dark cave. She might sit reading a paperback Sebastián had given her in 1981, the handwritten inscription no longer legible, the letters fuzzy and blurred, but special all the same. How and why had he given it to her? What had he been trying to tell her? Had he imagined that she’d be reading the inscription twenty years later, when he was dead and she was alone? A weekend afternoon might find her refolding a dresser drawer full of Francisco’s old clothes, items she’d saved these many years for no reason she could recall, and then going to the old photo albums to verify that her elder son had actually worn them. It was as if she were fact-checking her own life. A full day could pass like this. She didn’t enter Nelson’s room, not yet, but felt certain that each night, as she slept, his things spread around the house of their own accord, to new and unexpected hiding places. Scripts appeared behind sofa cushions, a pair of laceless sneakers materialized in the pantry behind a bag of rice. Someone, she was sure, was moving the family pictures.