Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

Now she stood in the kitchen, holding the receiver with both hands.

“How was your birthday?” Mónica asked.

“Great.”

“When will you be back?”

From San Jacinto, Nelson rattled off the names of a few towns they hoped to visit in the coming weeks. It seems the word about Diciembre and its tour had spread, and many municipalities were interested in hosting them. The rains were ending, the festival season would soon be under way, and Henry had decided Diciembre would take advantage of these potentially large and boisterous audiences. Why wouldn’t they? Was there any hurry to come home?

“Of course there isn’t,” Mónica said. “As long as you’re happy, that’s what matters.”

“Are you doing all right, Mom?”

She told Nelson she was fine.

To me, she confessed: “I’d already had two months to begin imagining my life without him.”

HENRY AND PATALARGA AGREE:When Nelson stepped out of the call center, he seemed a little stricken. They made room for him on the bench, but he opted to stand before them instead, hands buried in his pockets, chin to his chest.

“What happened?” Henry asked, but Nelson didn’t answer, so they watched him, swaying left to right, looking down at his feet. A minute passed like this.

“Are you going to say anything?” Henry asked.

“Are you cold?” Patalarga said. “Should we go to the hotel?”

“She’s pregnant,” Nelson answered, still looking down. His voice was soft, almost inaudible over the humming noise of the park where they sat. He looked up then, and they saw his helpless eyes, the puffy skin beneath them. He pursed his lips: he had the bewildered expression of a student trying to solve a problem he doesn’t quite understand.

“The baby isn’t mine. That’s what she told me. I asked her how she knew, and she said she just did. I asked her if she’d taken a test, and she said that was none of my business.”

“Women know these things,” Henry said.

“I’m sorry,” Patalarga added.

“She’s going to marry that other guy.”

(Ixta is adamant that she never said this: “Nelson invented that. I’m sure he believed it, but Mindo and I never had plans to be married.” She found the idea laughable.)

Henry stood and embraced his protégé.

“Did he cry?” I asked.

Henry frowned at the question in a way that suddenly embarrassed me. “No, I don’t think so, though I’m not sure why it matters.”

So either Nelson cried or he didn’t. They spent the next few hours walking the streets of San Jacinto, rather directionless, trying to raise Nelson’s spirits. It wasn’t easy. Henry says he offered to cancel the next day’s show, but Nelson wouldn’t hear of it. The show must go on, et cetera, et cetera. Patalarga suggested they get drunk, an easy option, and cheap, considering the altitude; but Nelson shrugged off the idea. “He wasn’t into it,” Patalarga told me. “Everything we offered, he turned down. I think he just wanted us to keep him company.”

“Did he say much?”

“He asked if anything like this had ever happened to either of us.”

In response, Henry explained that heartbreak is like shattered glass: while it’s impossible that two pieces could splinter in precisely the same pattern, in the end, it doesn’t matter, because the effect is identical.

“I suppose so,” said Nelson.

To further prove the point, Henry told of his infidelities, from which he claimed to have derived no pleasure, none whatsoever, and his subsequent divorce. He did not mention Rogelio, not yet — though his old lover would be making an appearance, indirectly, that very same night. One could call it serendipity or coincidence or luck (which comes in two, often linked, varieties); one could also just call it life .

Patalarga took up the argument, and told of his move at age seventeen from his hometown in the mountains to the city; and the girl he’d left behind.

“What was her name?” Nelson asked.

As it happens, I asked the same thing.

Her name was Mercedes — Mechis — and they were madly in love. She wanted to believe he’d come back for her, and Patalarga was afraid to let her think any different. So they conspired to never speak of it, both assuming the other believed this fiction. In fact, neither of them actually did. Once in the city, Patalarga changed his name, changed his life. They wrote letters for a time, but these fizzled out. He was embarrassed to tell her about his new friends. He never forgot her, but something shifted: he’d be riding the bus to the university, and realize, suddenly, that he hadn’t thought of her in months. The longer this went on, the more ashamed he was. He didn’t go home for three years, by which time he was a different person entirely. When they saw each other the first time, he expected she’d yell at him, curse him, beat him with small, closed fists and ask him why. He was prepared for this, but what actually happened was much worse.

“What happened?” asked Nelson.

Nothing. Mechis had married another man. She had a child, a little boy, who must have been eighteen months old, standing wobbly but on his own two feet, and clinging tightly to his father’s pant leg. Mechis’s husband was friendly, and shook Patalarga’s hand with an appalling lack of jealousy. And Mechis? She was entirely indifferent to Patalarga, as if she didn’t even recognize him.

“That night, I cried like a baby.”

“That’s awful.”

“You know, it was probably just the altitude,” Henry offered, which only managed to draw a weak smile out of Nelson.

Eventually, they ended up in the main plaza, the one section of San Jacinto that can conceivably be described as pleasant. There was a giant stone cathedral lit dramatically with floodlights, and glowing like an apparition; at the other end, a recently built hotel fronted with greenish mirrored glass; hideous, but also startling, as if an alien spacecraft had landed in the center of town. Somehow the contrast was less troubling than intriguing. A troubadour sang before a sparse audience of foreigners and elderly, the colonial-era fountain bubbling behind him. There were no moto taxis, which gave the few blocks around this plaza a kind of solemnity banished from the rest of the bustling city. Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson strolled along the sidewalks, and happened by a shuttered tourist office. Its broad window featured a few posters of local attractions, and they paused before it, their attention drawn not by those images but by a very large and detailed regional map. The villages and towns were noted with black dots, the routes between them marked in red. As if by common agreement, the three actors stopped, all of them curious to find themselves on this map, trace their circuitous path through the mountains, the lowlands, and back. They placed their fingers to the window, laughing as the name of one village or another brought up some outlandish memory. Here we killed! Here we bombed! Here we triumphed over the elements! Henry would later tell me how happy it made him to see Nelson laughing along with them. They’d been through a lot together: eight weeks and a few days of movement, the only constant being the play they performed every evening. Different audiences in different towns, each with its own history and character, with its own unique interpretation of the play, and of the actors themselves. In one village, at the conclusion of the show, the local elder stood before the audience and, with great ceremony, gave them each a strip of long, rubbery material, as a gift. Something like leather, but different. To chew? To smoke? It turned out to be the desiccated tongue of a bull. No one knew what to do with it. Henry thanked the elder, the man’s wrinkled face contorting into a pleasant smile, then a boy stood and tied the bands around each of Diciembre’s wrists. Tightly.