Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

Everyone clapped.

And the map seemed to contain it all. It was as if it had been made for them.

“Is this where you first saw the name of Rogelio’s village?” I asked Henry during our first interview, many months later.

He nodded gravely. “It is.”

“And what was your reaction?”

“It was just one of those things.” He paused, and took a deep breath. “One of the many details I’d forgotten. Rogelio had told me where he was from — he’d told me everything — but if you’d asked me just a moment before what the name of that village was, I never would have remembered it.”

“But when you saw it …”

“I knew.”

“Did you tell Nelson and Patalarga right away?”

Henry did more than that: he placed his index finger on the dot next to this town’s name, and upon realizing it wasn’t far, a couple of hours at most from San Jacinto, he shuddered. He fell silent. He’d begun — dimly — to comprehend the possibility this town represented. A way to close off the past, to make peace with it.

Had he forgotten Nelson’s heartbreak? Was he succumbing once again to his habitual selfishness?

“No,” Henry told me. “I thought we’d all benefit.”

He said the name to himself and felt its power, his finger pressed against the window, holding fast to the point floating on the map. To me, he explained: it might as well have been a flashing light, or a star.

“Gentlemen, there’s been a change in plans,” Henry said. “ This is where we’re going next.”

THERE WAS A MOMENT,sometime in the third hour of my second interview with Mónica, when I found myself with one of the family’s photo albums spread across my lap. This shouldn’t have been unexpected, I suppose — in word and gesture I’d made it clear this was precisely the sort of access I was hoping for — and yet somehow it was. Already I knew more about Nelson than I did about many of the people I’d grown up with, including dear friends, including even family members. I was coming close to deciphering some of the mystery around our one brief encounter, but there was something else too. It wasn’t so much what I’d learned, as how I’d learned it: Nelson’s secrets revealed to me by his confidantes, his lovers, his classmates, people who’d seen fit to trust me, as if by sharing their various recollections, we could together accomplish something on his behalf. Re-create him. Reanimate him. Bring him back into the world. Piece by piece, I was gathering a sense of the richness of his inner life, and his imagination. I’d followed, at least partially, the trajectory Diciembre had taken a half a year before. I’d been to the same places, seen the same landscapes, talked to many of the same people. I’d tried to see things through Nelson’s eyes, using his journals to guide me whenever possible. On good days, I felt I was succeeding.

Now it was January 2002. I sat on the sofa of Nelson’s childhood home with his mother, listening to her stories of this shy, sensitive boy whom she’d raised into a man. She cried a little, apologized, then cried some more.

And I was turning the pages of this photo album, under Mónica’s watchful eye, when I came across a picture of Nelson and Francisco, circa 1983, posing before the monkey pen at the zoo. Neither Mónica nor Sebastián are in the frame, the brothers stand alone in the foreground. Francisco looks bored, antsy, but Nelson is a guileless five-year-old, absolutely charmed by what he sees. His smile is goofy, his brown eyes wide. He has one arm around his brother’s waist, and another pointing back over his shoulder, toward the animals.

“Look at him,” Mónica said, and I squinted at this picture, at Nelson’s smiling face. I compared this image with others I’d seen, with my own fragmented recollection of our one encounter, at the beginning of July the previous year; and suddenly, I had the strangest sensation, like double vision. For just an instant, I thought I saw myself standing just to the side of Francisco and Nelson, with another family — mine — and another set of siblings — my two sisters. An unlikely, but not impossible, coincidence. I stared at the image.

I also grew up in this city.

I was also once a brown-haired boy with thin legs and a bony chest.

I also went to the zoo. We all did.

It wasn’t me hovering in the background of that old photograph, of course, but that’s not the point. It could’ve been.

FOR A VARIETY OF REASONSI’ve decided not to include the name of this town. I’ll call it T—. I was born there, after all, and though I left when I was only three, I suppose this fact gives me some right to call it whatever I please. My parents brought my sisters and me to the city when I was very young, and I’m grateful that they did. I have no memories of our life before the move, though we children were regularly subjected to my father’s long monologues on the town and its lore, so it always hovered before us, an idyllic mountain dreamscape, its perfection taunting us from afar. My father only wanted us to feel connected to the place, a sentiment I understand and appreciate now that I’m older, but at the time, those notions felt imposed, like a state religion. In my memory, these speeches are always interrupted by a car alarm or a power outage or the neighbor’s overloud television set. Once in a great while the three of us children were packed onto a bus and forced to visit. We dreaded these trips, or pretended to, in order to spite our parents. We stared at our books, and refused to be impressed by the scenery. When the war closed off travel to the provinces, part of me felt relief. By the time the shooting stopped, there was no reason to travel anymore: nearly everyone my parents knew and loved had left the old town, and come to the city to start over, just as we had.

But the T— of my memory, or my parents’ memory, is not the same place as the one Diciembre encountered on their visit. In order to prepare this manuscript, I conducted interviews with Patalarga and Henry in the capital, long conversations from which I’ve already quoted, dialogues that veered forward and back in time. T—, though they were only there very briefly, appeared too: in shadow, as a backdrop for a series of events unfolding in strict adherence to the highlands’ acute surrealist mode (a mere two thousand nine hundred meters above sea level, in case you were wondering). Henry and Patalarga both report that they felt happy to be free of the itinerary, to improvise once more as they had on those first epic Diciembre tours, when they were younger. But according to both men, Nelson was the most enthusiastic of them all, the most eager to get moving again. There was no further mention of Nelson’s heartbreak, Ixta’s pregnancy, or whatever his plans might be as a result. From the moment Henry had pointed to the spot on the map, Nelson was sold. He was fleeing. He wanted to put distance between him and the news that had left him so shaken.

“Yes,” Nelson said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Only Patalarga voiced any reservations, mentioning casually their performance scheduled for the following evening. Henry was unmoved. “We’ll cancel it.”

“Why can’t we wait a day?”

Henry was far too anxious to explain. He pointed at Nelson instead. “Look at the boy. He’s a wreck. We have to keep moving. This is how life is.”

“Don’t do it for me,” Nelson protested.

Patalarga stared at Nelson, as if this last line had been uttered in a foreign language.

“He’s not doing it for you,” Patalarga said. “He doesn’t do things for you.”

Nelson looked to Henry for confirmation, and the playwright shrugged.